OK, Alpha, I will qualify my somewhat open-ended and, truthfully, rather useless statement, as requested by you. However, the evidence which you brought also needs to be addressed, because I think it brings up an important point of 4E, and DnD in general.
However, first of all, I wanna apologise if I came across as being unreasonable and trollish - this was not my intent at all, and I quite frequently make tongue-in-cheek statements such as 'Fucking 4E...', which should be familiar to people who have read the guide I am working on. Additionally, my reply to you was mainly knee-jerk, as I have too much experience with mindless 4E fanboys, and did not mean to lump you into the same category.
This guy who you linked here talks about being a "veteran". Now, 'veterancy' is a state which is given much hype in a lot of systems, simply by virtue of being there longer than everyone else. However, in fact, it doesn't mean you understand diddly-squat more about the game. Seriously. I have been with 3.5 since it came out, and quite frankly, I am constantly blown away by people who have hardly held the game for five minutes on things I simply didn't see before. To quote the Ferret of SCG fame "I have known people who have been playing since Alpha and
still suck." Much the same can be said of DnD, which is actually a very confusing, complex and counter-intuitive system, known for hiding options and encouraging dumpster-diving in order to obtain massive benefits. This has been true of just about every edition, simply because DnD stubbornly refuses to evolve from a miniatures game played in mass combat.
However, DnD also possesses a massive mitigating factor in the form of the DM, who can essentially totally bar any option he deems, for whatever reason, to be non-conducive to the gaming experience of (hopefully) the group. As a result, it is easily possible to see something, make a false assumption, and then impose this on players who may not know any better. Additionally, traditionally speaking, the best options in DnD don't jump out at you screaming: no, they are sneaky and resourceful, like ninjas, and require incredible amounts of picking through and dumpster-diving in order to find. This is the whole 'mastery of the system' idea, explained
here by Monte Cook. Although he claims this to be a large part of what they wanted to do with 3E, in actual fact, it has been present throughout DnD. While I cannot call specific examples, it is worth noting that in 2E and 1E, the gulf between casters and noncasters was even WIDER than it was in 3E, which honestly takes quite some achieving.
Resultantly, you can be as 'veteran' as you like and still not get squat about how the system works, simply because you might have played the game for YEARS with a set of assumptions reinforced by your group and DM while not truly encountering how the system works. This guy spouting creds does little to instil in me a belief that he understands how these systems work, and his subsequent statements only take that further.
He claims that 3E had evolved in a distended fashion, and that 4E is somehow more 'elegant'. However, you're comparing apples and oranges! The amount of material we have for 4E (or rather, how little material) is what gives this illusion, not anything else. This so-called 'elegance' is termed 'lack of accessible material'. Give 4E five years, and see if you can still make these claims. As the article I linked indicates, the 'dumpster-diving' is very much ongoing, and, with any luck, those trained drunk monkeys in WotC's R&D department will give birth to another Pun-Pun in no time.
I have never accused 4E of being either dumbed-down or simplistic. In fact, it is MORE complex than 3E ever was. The good options are even more hidden than they were in 3E. As an example, Intimidate is the deadliest weapon in a 1st level adventurer's array of abilities. Seriously, by means of a single feat, maxing out my main stat, and picking the right race, a 1st level warlock can inflict effectively 17 or more points of damage on a d20 roll of 4 or more against a bloodied opponent. If this option had been printed as the at-will ability it is, there would have been cries of outrage. However, in fact, there weren't, because this is how DnD always has worked, and continues to work. If the 'elegance' that this man claims 4E possesses is making good options clear and discouraging the 'pile of rule supplements', it certainly fails at both ALREADY.
In order to reinforce my point further, I deeply encourage people to read the guide to clerics in my sig. Veekie and I, with notable assistance from DemonLord57, have spent weeks going through all the stuff required to be useful. Yes, not good. USEFUL. 4E requires GREATER levels of optimisation to avoid totally sucking. While 3E could at least mitigate this craziness to some extent, in 4E, if you don't opt using high-level theory, you simply suck at what you do, and reduce combats to long slogs of circle-sucking. Locating optimal options no longer requires optimising as a character - it requires optimising your own party, and far, far further than 3E ever called for. Quite honestly, the levels of dumpster-diving and number-processing required to make an efficient (not optimal - efficient) character in 4E exceed 3E by several orders of magnitude.
Furthermore, 4E's systems are not elegant at all. Classes frequently do not fall into the roles they are described at all (the warlock, for instance, is not a striker at all, despite all attempts to be such), subsystems within the game totally fail (the skill challenge rules, which actually discourage teamwork and increase the own-suck dichotomy), some options are so ridiculous that there is no reason NOT to take them (divine whoracle, I'm looking at you), and in general, it is still easily possible to push an optimal character right off the RNG without even trying very hard. To add to this, the disconnect between crunch and fluff in 4E is greater than it ever has been, and as a result, flavour builds get hurt more, whereas the opts who work mechanics-up get more advantages than ever. Furthermore, the system is pervasive with sameness - everything seems to operate identically, and the variation in effects is so minor as to be irrelevant. Toss in the fact that solo monsters as written as insanely, terribly stupid and require combat tedium into irrelevance, and perhaps you can see that no, 4E is not elegant.
Now, I don't want to devolve this into a rant, so if you would like to address this, Alpha, please open another thread, preferably not on this sub-forum, where we can discuss this without derailment.