I think we're probably using different definitions of streamlined. I think in 4th you are always going to have one party formation -- someone needs to play the role of striker where in 5th you can have an all striker party if you want.
No they didn't. I don't remember who wrote the article -- might have been Monte Cook but don't quote me on that, Cook was just the guy I tended to disagree with more than anyone else. It was a mechanics first, flavor second attitude vs Gygaxian cruft "story first and foremost" even if balance goes all to hell.
They tried hard to sell the idea that you needed the roles: Defender, Leader, Striker, Controller, but in actual practice, having DMed at least 200 sessions of 4th edition for many different groups, any decent players could do fine with any mix of classes/roles. You could definitely succeed with 4 Strikers or 4 Leaders or anything else, if the players were reasonably smart and conversant with the system. I remember at one convention, they had a tournament module that was really hard, and it was a contest to see which group could get the farthest in it. The winner was a group of four Rangers.
I hate some of the elements of D&D which have persisted all this time, just because of how things were in Jack Vance's novels. Like, the mechanics are just bad. Unbalanced, and they always lead to some kind of player discontent, because the different classes have wildly different power curves, resting strategies, and priorities. Some people might think that's good, for whatever reason. I don't. I don't think it's good when one class is designed to need to rest all the time, and another class is designed to not need to rest, because no matter what, one of those players gets disserved by how things go down. I don't think it's good when one class is weak and another is strong at one level range, but then the other class is strong while the first is weak at a different level range. I think the idea of memorizing spells, of spell slots, is just dumb from both a mechanical AND narrative perspective.
Yet, it seems I am very much in the minority. When they "fixed" (according to me, but not to most) those issues, the playerbase rioted and jumped ship. To this day I still don't really know why.
