Preliminary thoughts on 4th Ed?

(I wasn't sure where to stick this thread, so it may need to be moved elsewhere).

So, we've started playing 4th edition. There's still stuff we haven't experienced yet, but we've got a much better feel for it. What do you like? What do you dislike?

To me, it feels like they sacrificed flavor for balance. It's disappointing to lose the flavor, but I'm glad they did it. They still managed to keep a lot of the flavor, plus the balance is more important to me. All of the classes feel somewhat close to each other in usefulness across levels, instead of having Fighter-ish classes start off strong, but then paling compared to the party Wizard who casts an AoE kill spell over and over again to instantly end any encounters. The skills are another area that feel like they sacrificed some flavor - jumping and swimming are drastically different skill sets, but they're lumped together under athletics. However, the benefit of less paperwork, and the fact that lumping skills together makes them more useful, is worth it.

I'm a bit worried about variety. It seems that there are a couple different options you have for each class, but not nearly as many as 3rd Ed/3.5. It was a problem that a player had to read through a huge number of spells if they wanted to be a spellcaster, but it did mean they could go many different routes. Sometimes when building a character, I wouldn't know what I wanted to do, because I wanted to do a character that was different than what I'd done before, and I couldn't always think of something. I'm concerned there will be less options with 4th Ed. I'm also worried about the feats. Everyone (except Fighters) get more feats, but there feels like significantly less feats that are particularly useful.

Also, it's not a problem with gameplay, but some of the stuff in the book is poorly written, or inconvenient. Sometimes it was something like not saying what page number to look for something they were referencing, or using confusing language for a power, etc.