#D&D4 just codified something that shook out to be pretty similar to late 3.5 action economy but there from the start

[morkaischosen]

The Pathfinder angle does deserve to be the headline there, though - Lancer didn't attract its initial playerbase by openly selling itself as Not 4e.

People rallied against 4e for being well designed? I always heard it was because it was too much like WoW.

D&D 4e being too much like WoW is one of those things that's true in places (it actually had design informed by WoW among other things but a lot of said design was actually remodeled to actually work in the context of tabletop game instead of trying to lazily transplant mechanics from a video game directly into a tabletop game), but ultimately is just a lazy shorthand for "it's like bideo gane therefore bad." On a deeper level D&D 4e wasn't rejected "just" because it was too much like videos game but because its designers actually took a look at all the things taken as default in D&D and actually considered how conducive they were to the experience people were seemingly looking for from D&D (D&D 4e being built to be a fun skirmish game didn't come out of nowhere: it was a response to people basically playing D&D 3e like that and finding the game too unbalanced to serve that experience).

Funnily enough, in being willing to reconsider what people actually wanted out of D&D, 4e is actually the edition of Hasbro D&D most aligned with what people seem to actually want out of D&D these days. A lot of the common design issues people bring up with 5e are issues that D&D 4e already rectified once and 5e actually walked back on because they wanted to get back the purists who had rejected 4e for not being D&D-shaped enough.