I've jumped the bandwagon back when 2nd was hot. When 3.0 and later 3.5 came out, the upgrade felt naturally. 3.0 just fixed a lot of stuff that was really clumbersome, like the THAC0. (Seriously, people only love this for nostalgia. BaB does the exact same thing, only it makes it a lot easier to calculate.)
You could upgrade your party from 2nd to 3rd to 3.5. You cannot upgrade your party from 3.5 to 4.0. That alone should say enough that 4.0 is not D&D.
Is 4.0 a bad game? I don't know. I've got the books, and they do feel like an MMO manual, with all those skills and abilities, rather than the spell list that people are familiar with. It seems more balanced, and combat surely seems more tactical. I can imagine that if you're a "kick in the door" kind of group, that 4.0 has it's merits. It seems to focus heavily on combat and not so much on RP, but of course, in the long run, how much of the game is combat is mostly up to the DM and partially up to the players. And out of combat you don't really need many rules.
Then again, I played around with the Bo9S and the ToM (by some called the alpha tests for 4.0), and having per encounter abilities over daily abilities and passive modifiers felt quite refreshing.
Basically, my group is playing D&D, and to us, 4.0 is not D&D, so we keep on playing what we're playing, basically 3.5. Doesn't mean I'm adverse to 4.0. If someone would ask me to join a 4.0 group, I probably would, at least to check it out, but probably to enjoy it as well.
The only gripe I have with 4.0 is that it caused WotC to try and kill off everything 3.5 related. E-Tools and Crystalkeep were instantly taken down, and books have become very rare to get your hands on, so any players joining our group have problems getting the material and constantly have to borrow.
D&D 4th Ed Good or Bad?
Re: D&D 4th Ed Good or Bad?
I never understood the "not D&D" thing, because 4E felt exactly like D&D to me. Later, I was talking to a friend who pointed out a plausible explanation, which is that the rule structure of the game shifted substantially from simulationism towards a narrative and game balance view. This doesn't matter to me, because to me D&D is about going into dungeons and killing dragons, and the game system is pretty fungible.