But to slap a new official edition out so soon after 3.5 appeared seems to be a grab at the big bucks (or admitting 3.5 sucked).
I think it's more appropriate to compare the release date for this (2008) to the release date for 3.0 (2000), since the fact that there even
is a 3.5 is basically an admission of problems with its ancestor. But that doesn't void your point, since even by
that standard, the time lapse of 8 years is shorter than with the previous updates (about 11 years each for 1st => 2nd and 2nd => 3rd).
Not to mention that you'd think that if they were going to go so far as to
make an interim .5 edition -- because the .0 version had so many problems -- then the end result ought to be
more stable, and have
greater longevity, than previous "full-level" edition changes. It basically got three additional years of playtesting by the entire D&D-playing audience, after all!
If people think that 3.5 continued to suck, then I'd be real curious to hear why. I never played it; my group tried 3.0, decided they didn't like it, and didn't even bother upgrading to 3.5 when it came out. All I know about 3.5 is that the books are better organized and easier to read, that the ranger changed somewhat, and a few other bits like that. Did they not change the parts that sucked the most?
And if so, then what does that say about 4th? I've only seen a little bit of one friend's 4th edition books, but I know this much: The one thing I thought was worst about 3.0/3.5, the confusing way they broke actions up into "standard" and "move" and all that, is still present in 4.0. And the one thing I thought was
best about 3.0/3.5, the way you could build your character out of individual levels of different classes, seems to be gone from 4.0.
John