Why didn't we switch to 4e/5e?

[TotallyNotEvil]

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3E finally had a formal skill system with skill points, but could quickly get extremely wonky if you weren't paying attention to it. You get some very bizarre results, like 20th-level rogues who can't find/disarm traps, or a 4th level commoner riding around a battletitan dinosaur. Among other things, the 3E skill system has scaling issues... can +0 through +23 really cover all the possibilities between mundane tasks and legendary superheroes? To use the "hot mess/hot rod" analogy... if you weren't paying attention to it, it could be unexpectedly vindictive and viciously punitive, but if you *really* knew how to push the right buttons, you could use it to rob a bank with a paperclip.

See, here's the rub. The bolded part? That's a feature, not a bug.

Who says rogues have to be able to find and disarm traps? Why can't a rogue be an assassin or a social butterfly? Or both, but learn the need to learn how to disarm traps also?

Ever if the game lets me pick an archetype, I'm then locked with that progression and those abilities. What if I want to dabble a bit? My character progression, while often mostly planned out, does have it's odd "I learned Neutralise Poison" moments, I want for the adventure to be able to affect my character's growth.

So maybe the sneaky, trap disarming rogue let his one true friend die, because he just couldn't cut it when fighting. Or he tried talking their way out of a pickle and just dug himself deeper.

Ultimately, 5E tries to dictate the characters through its bounded progression, and that just kills it for me.

The fact the archetypes are fairly stereotypical and don't mix well doesn't help any.