This is a blog post by Ewen Cluney, a translator and RPG designer (unless you only play D&D, you have probably heard of him). In this article he approaches 4th Edition and its influences and he mentions something I had never ever considered -4E's streamlined and linear gameplay owes its existence to the CharOp scene. In fact, once he mentioned it, I could see so many other signs - whenever the designers would talk about 3.5 in interviews, they would make it so very clear that they thought it was a horrible game, very flawed, very bad. They thought this would gain them track with their audience. They thought theorethical optimization meant people didn't really like 3.5, since everyone was poking holes in it (nevermind that the same thing happened with 4E before it was even released, but oh they couldn't know that).
Isn't that, I don't know, interesting? Just sharing the blog post, since it's pretty good and something I had never noticed myself.