I've been with the game since 2E and there was a lot of resistance in the group to going over to 3E, but in the end we found it to be a superior game. We also play a lot of non-D&D games as well like DEADLANDS, TRAVELLER, STAR WARS d6, WORLD OF DARKNESS (which I don't like very much, but we still play from time to time to keep the vampire fans in the group happy) and a few other D20 games like JUDGE DREDD and BABYLON 5.

When 4E came along we were quite startled at how lame it was. We pondered the resistance to change thing, but we'd been happy to move from 2E to 3E after a decade spent playing that and, being older with less free time, we hadn't played anywhere near as much 3E as we had 2E, so we weren't as invested in the game. If 4E had been good, we'd have had no trouble switching over. Some of the ideas, like different combat options and better balancing of the wizard at every level, aren't too bad, but just shambolically implemented.

The biggest problem is that there is no non-crunch justification of the rules. Healing surges are nonsensical, and reminiscent of that increasingly sad tendency for computer games to have you diving behind a wall for five seconds and magically repairing damage from machine guns and grenades. Stuff happens 'just because' rather than there being a logical reason for it. The arbritary nature of the rules is something 2E was criticised for and 3E made a big thing of getting rid of them and having explanations for every rule in the game, so 4E is a huge backwards step on that front.

Our group also plays the game fairly 'realistically'. We have house rules for how armour absorbs damage (rather than making you harder to hit) and that armour has its own set of hit points, which you have to go and repair after battles, which is fairly realistic. We also have rules for friendly fire in melee, so you can't just use overwhelming missile fire to bring down the enemy whilst the tanks stand up front and absorb the punishment (a favoured tactic of some groups and in some of the 2E and 3E-based computer games). 4E is very much the antithesis of realism-focused roleplaying. Still, we played it for about 3 months before concluding it was bobbins, so we gave it a fair enough shakedown, I think.

PATHFINDER is much better than either 3E or 4E, but it does have it's own problems. They've fiddled with the classes and brought in different EXP tables, but balancing is still a huge problem, and as far as I can tell at high levels wizards and then clerics will still dominate the game to an unhealthy extent over non-magic-users. There are ways they could fix that within the 3E framework, but they seemed to settle on the side of being conservative and not offending the hardcore 3E players who like that stuff (i.e. the wizard-players).