Having played all the editions in the comic, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that 4e is unfairly maligned and I would rather play it over Advanced 2e or 3.5.
The powers system gets bloated fast, but offloading potentially broken support spells and powers into 10min to 1 hour rituals is genius. 4e has the only useful version of Pyrotechnics between the listed editions.
Short Rests being 5 min instead of 1 hour really feels like the pace of encounters keeps up without any awkward pauses, and means encounter powers are reliably up by the next fight.
The understanding that mechanical roles and flavor power sources could be swapped around and make a bunch of classes instead of trying to theme classes solely around fantasy archetypes let them have greater design freedom.
Short rests and powers attached to them, subclasses being a core part of the basic classes, ritual casting, at-will basic spells for casters, & proto-advantage in some class abilities are all extracted from 4e.
5e isn’t bad - its arguably the best version of D&D. But I’ve seen a lot better fantasy systems than D&D, and some fantastic mechanics left on the cutting room floor between NEXT and 5e.
