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As a DM of almost three decades, and several setting/rules revisions, I was drawn to this project due to the stated backwards compatibility with 3.5 rulebooks. It is trumpeted as a refrain in all of the press releases and promotional material.
There are many things that seem to require as much conversion as 4e seems to present. The races and classes are fine examples of this. I want a Pathfinder wizard to be able to adventure side by side with my Gatecrasher (PrC from the Manual of the Planes) without massive bookkeeping or in play balance issues. In the curent Alpha form I do not see this.
Skills are another area where this is prevalent, and one that I heartily disagree with (see my posts on the Keep Skill Points thread).
There is also a lot to love about the fixes you are looking at: perception is wonderful, the CMB for resolving combat maneuvers looks great and will be playtested next week in my game.
I would like to invite the other playtesters and forum contributors to share their thoughts here on the subject of compatibility. I have over $3K in 3.0/3.5 books, and I am sure I am not the only one.
George "Loki" Wiliams
http//planejammer.wordpress.com
http://www.planewalker.com
http://www.spelljammer.org
I made a post yesterday to state that though I like all the changes and might even houserule a lot of them back into the game at some point, I feel that they should be scaled way back for basically the reasons you list above. I advocate including them in the published book as optional rules. That way, DMs who like them and are willing to do all the conversion work can do so, but everyone still has a resource for 3.5 games.
BTW, I'm a huge planescape fan. I have virtually all of the original materials, except for Hellbound. The one time I saw a copy in a store, it was in pretty bad shape. Now, I can't make myself spend $100 for a copy off of ebay that's probably in just as bad a shape.
