> Was 4 really worse than 5?

They're just very different. 4 is as much a tactics game as an RPG.

Older D&D editions actually had a tactical miniatures game. Of course D&D originally evolved from the Chainmail miniatures rules. 4e had a miniatures game as well as some great tactical board games that are fun with friends and can even be played solo. With 5e they wanted to emphasize "theater of the mind" but you can still have fairly tactical battles with miniatures, terrain, etc.

All D&D versions seem pretty great. I've played the 2.5e CRPGs (fun!), classic Pathfinder (basically 3.5+ - also fun!), 4e RPG, miniatures game, boardgames (all definitely fun!), and lots of 5e (also very fun!) The classic rulebooks are baroque, fascinating, and immensely charming. The settings (Forgotten Realms etc.) are brilliant.

I loved 3.5, but it was really complex and unbalanced. 4E was a very different kind of game, more like World of Warcraft than 3.5. But I enjoyed it a lot too (the classes were much better balanced), and it was far easier to teach to new players because they couldn't as easily dig themselves into a grave with poor character development (anti-munchkinism, or whatever you call it).

I don't mean role playing a flawed character for story flavor, but that in 3.5e it's way too easy to accidentally make a non viable build that's drastically weaker than other party members (and level appropriate enemies).

5e is more similar to a simplified 3.5e with a little less complexity. And rather than focusing on the tactical turn based combat of the 4e (which was often kind a drag to execute without digital DM aids and digital tabletops), they shifted the focus more to storytelling and player involvement. It was the right move, IMO, for a tabletop role playing game.

On the other hand, I don't think the 5e rules translate as well to computer RPGs. BG3 shines for its exceptional narrative freedom, but its combat is lackluster compared to Temple of Elemental Evil or even Nwverwinter Nights or KotoR, which all used 3E/3.5E to allow really cool build diversity.

4e was a very different kind of game. They did fix the balance problem, but they did it by making every class work in pretty much the same way. Also, the focus was so strongly on the battlegrid that it felt more like a tactical skirmish game than a roleplaying game.

Yep.

Every character class was practically the same with the same mechanics (at will "spells", per encounter "spells", per long rest "spells") and a massive amount of repetition across abilities. As a DM, I was an over worked CPU; monsters were boring and scripted and every character class had liberal amounts of "force the monster to do x" actions that resulted in monsters having little to no agency.

I ran a few adventures in 4.0 and put the books away forever.

Yeah was pretty crap. There were some positive items here or there, like trying to balance the "linear figher/quadratic wizard" issues, and things like healing surges helped keep play smooth, but the whole thing basically felt like they saw that 'the yout' were all about those MMOs and they tried to make that on the tabletop.