I believe the idea of the multiple books is to create some sort of organization for the overall system, while in 3.5 they didn't have player's handbook 2,3,4, they did have a bunch of other books with character classes, and options, so here there trying to somewhat organize all the classes into one series of books. whether that good or bad im waiting till PHB2 comes out to decide.
oh woops, that was kind of off topic, sorry. For me 4th edition is, interesting, I never commited much to 3.5, as I recently got involved with tabletop games, so i cant connect to the players who have invested over a thousand dollars into a system and loss parts of the old system.
