ok i have to pull out my Big Dick card here.
When i was 11 i saw the first internationally-available DnD, the red box with the Elmore-drawn dragon, and i had it bought for me.
Since then i DM'd (never played) DnD, Gamma World, Rolemaster, CoC, ADnD, Space Opera, Twilight 2000 ... i could name them all but its a pointless exercise. i *knew* every system out there, and GM's the ones worth playing.
I also worked at (and practically live in) the first RPG.. miniatures, videogames, reenactment models, and so on .. so on.. shop in my home country.
Ofc that wasn't enough so i started "publishing" (writing by hand and then photocopying, and putting it up for free in the shop) a weekly bulletin with mods for stats, rules, and game resources for every major game out there, which eventually half the roleplayers of my city wound up using.
Also i painted miniatures, wrote modules, created 2 whole systems from the ground up, i did a re-write of the Iron Crown's Rolemaster system so complete, that it actually became both usable and fun, translated materials (thats how i taught myself english, by interpreting the expert, companion and master sets of DnD, as they didnt exist in my language).
Ofc i also collected. And played *other* games, such as the Rogue Trader version of WHM40k (i even had bloodbowl first ed), but no system went without a major restructurization.
Needless to say i was there during the first tournaments, gaming associations (often as founding member), the first internet fan groups.
We played until Vampire came out, when half of us got bored with the simplistic system, and the other half got smitten by the uber-gay emo'ness of it all. Then Magic came out and RPGs died.
DnD is a fun game; it was, at least. ADnD was better "if you were a DnD fan".
I'm afraid i can't find it anymore but i had a nice resource page on Gygax's original DnD, its absurdist rules, and why they made sense.
Now, along the same lines, i can see why people would like the "new" DnD, i still go to my old haunting spot and see the ever-dwindling PnP gamers.
But those people are not us; they don't like the same game as we did.
Just as some guy wrote a review of Shichinin no Samurai and called it "the boringest film ever", and the thousands of people who think that (thank you RedLetterMedia) The Empire Strikes Back is the "most boring" of the six Star Wars film (IMDb votes docet) and Revenge of the Sith is the coolest because of lightsaborz, we're not the same.
We had more refined tastes, we liked the complexity, the many solutions one could reach by exploiting the different resources at your disposal. We liked so much more of it - but that is not the point.
People who like 3/3.5/4 are the same who like lightsabrzorz. They like the easy game mode because they only understand the easy game mode. They like superhuman heroes who double-wield like it's eating peanuts, and never question their own mortality.
KK. Thats enough.