So I'll go ahead and be vain and post first. Every time I read one of these things I think that 4e is "one step forward, two steps back." (I reviewed
Races & Classes as well.)
I always like the stated design goals in the front of these books. But they seem to apply them very inconsistently. In this book, they talk about getting rid of false parallelism - with the monsters. I totally agree. If something is fire-based, you don't need to crap out another 3 variants of it to "cover all 4 elements".
However, then they go and make the core races with false paralellism so bad it seems like you're playing Magic: The Gathering. "Hmmm, dwarves like mountains and elves like forests. So humans like plains... And halflings - uh, we don't have anything for rivers, they get rivers."
With the combat rules, they talk about removing all the "fiddly" little combat modifiers that turn c round o combat into a math-fest, and they change a lot of stuff to that end. Great! Then they go back in and layer so much crap on top that 4e playtesters are suggesting sticking pins in your minis so you can stack the 3-4 colored beads atop them needed to indicate all the fiddly little modifiers they can get now!!!
It smells like they made a classic design mistake - doing a round and nicely streamlining everything, then sitting there and thinking about it too long. "Oh, let's just add this." "Ooo, and this." "How about a special case for this?" Then after a while you're back where you started in terms of meeting your design goals, just different.