To each his own but 4E felt like an attempt to replicate an MMORPG video game with dice, pencil, and paper - which, if that’s what I wanted, I’d be playing an MMORPG video game.

Further, as a DM who prefers “theater of the mind” over extensive rules and intricate battle maps and miniatures, 4E felt incredibly constraining. It seemed to drive players towards a very tactical combat style of play, which I personally am not excited about, and further almost seemed to require maps/ministers because of how tactical combat had become. Plus with so many rules it seemed to take away the DMs agency in relying on their own judgment and “the rule of cool.”

This last bit may be most personal to me since I completely skipped 3E so I was coming straight from 2E: the 4E characters felt like super heroes at first level. This was also a big turn off, something that still bothers me today with 5E. I prefer a much grittier, lethal style of the lay here surviving those early levels is not a given.

The older I get the more I try to embrace the idea that “it’s ok if other people like things you don’t like” so I’m not going to go so far as to say 4E was objectively “bad”. But I will say when I first picked up the 4E PHB when I was thinking about returning to ttrpg after a few years off, I found myself getting upset and putting the book down and wondering “what have they done to this game that I love.” I was completely out of the scene and didn’t know I could find other players out there playing older versions or that there was this whole OSR movement happening. It wasn’t until 5E (which I still have some issues with though nowhere near as many) came around that I got back into ttrpg.