This is interesting.

Back when 4e came out, I was heavily into 3.5. I still have a mountain of 3.5 books on my shelves. I also have quite a bit of 2e stuff and my ever-evolving 2e home doc is sitting at a comfortable 22 pages, with more being added in the future because that's how the 2e doc that started it's life ages ago goes: it's a living and evolving document.

4e however, for me, clicked when it released. I haven't really had any immersion problem with the game.

I don't know if it's because for me, I remember the 2e > 3e edition shift, and boy was it a shift. If the internet was as widespread back then as it was when 4e came out, i'm pretty sure we would've been talking about how 4e was in actuality the second great edition war. Not that there was no gnashing of teeth during the 2e>3e shift. out of morbid curiosity i googled to see if one of the old sites was still around decrying 3e and lo and behold, it still exists as a husk, no articles written in the past 3 years, no forum posts in the past year and yet still shambling along on the internet like a directionless zombie.

And it still has a collection of the hottest of takes, fresh from the year 2000.

But going back to 4e, for me it clicked because it offered a different experience then 2e and 3e. I came into the game open and ready and willing to get something new and let myself get absorbed into it. I've already bought into the ideas 4e offered so my mind is more then willing to ignore issues. Dr Who fans may better relate if I call it a Perception Filter of sorts. My mental state had already primed me to ignore the inconsistencies, even if i was subconsciously aware of them.

Looking at D&D, my top 3 choices in no particular order
2e is my quick and dirty, lethal D&D where backups characters are plentiful and your life expectancy is low
3e is a game where i can fine tune a character to run like a precision sports car and if there's something i want to do, there's probably a rule or sourcebook out there, it's both fiddly and oddly freeing
4e gave me BIG DANG HEROES D&D right out of the starting gate and mixed it with tactical combat i found missing from the previous 2 editions

This is probably why 5e has yet to really grab me.

I wasn't sold on it when it first came out. The system read as not doing anything particularly better then a version of D&D I didn't already own, so I didn't feel compelled to look too deeply into it. Note that we can't say it wasn't due to not having the opportunity to play the game cooling my feelings on it: during 4e's launch I was in the middle of an ongoing 3.5 campaign with my main group and we simply transitioned to pathfinder after that campaign was over. I don't think we ever played ANY 4e in my main group outside of a couple one-shots at most, but I was still hyped for the game and bough it's products out of actual interest in what it offered.

5e cleaned things up for sure. Mechanically I have more issues with the 3 previous versions of D&D then I do with 5e, and while I don't agree with some of the directions the designers chose, like the low bounded accuracy, that's more due to personal taste then me having issues with how it mechanically runs so it gets a pass. But a lot of those issues with older systems, and how I handle them, are part of the game's personality and feel.

I could rant for ages on my problems with 3e, a personal project and fantasy heartbreaker came out of me wanting to see if i could "fix" 4e as a design exercise, and yes 2e can be janky and scuffed at times, but as an example the 2e Mythos Priests are still the best interpretation of the cleric, IMO, and i will fite u if disagree. But nothing about 5e really managed to grab my attention.

with 4e it gave me something new to digest and jump headlong into. something new to explore mechanically while still being thematically D&D. I already slew my edition change bugbears ages ago and learning new systems usually gave me something I might be able to back-port or reverse engineer. it felt exciting learning this game and when i did eventually have the opportunity to play it, it was a blast.

and until a while ago I hadn't really had the opportunity to play 5e proper (my main gaming group is currently playing the 5e derived Adventures in Middle Earth, but that's a different beast of expectations then base 5e). I'll be the first to admit my initial exposure to 5e proper wasn't the best. it was rough.

but we had a post-campaign meetup the week before to decide on what we would play next, and had our session 0 proper yesterday night to discuss characters and more about the setting of the module, where i'll be starting at 1st level this time, this time having the opportunity to give the system a proper college try.

But i'm still missing the same excitement I had for 4e, or even the thought of hacking out some mechanics of other games and dropping them into 2e (i have a rough idea for some overland travel mechanics to spice things up I'm stewing on based off of AiME's Journey rules, using weighted hex flowers for weather and random encounter tables).