Too invested for 4e

I've been thinking a fair amount about the fourth edition of D&D, which is "imminent", or at least announced, no doubt to the very sudden detriment of sales of 3e and 3.5 products.

And although almost everything I hear about it sounds positive to me, at the same time I'm more exasperated rather than interested in the concept. I guess I'm just not ready to switch. I've been wondering why that is, and I guess I'm just too invested in the current edition. I feel like I have too much material still that I haven't used enough, and frankly, there's tons of material that I still want to pick up!

This is kinda new for me; although I've been floating around the RPG hobby for quite some time, I've never really seriously invested in a game before the release of 3e back in 2000. I picked up tons of 3e product. I was exasperated and unhappy with the release of 3.5, but since the compatibility between the two versions was very high (most products can be used as is in either ruleset) and because the core books were mostly online in the form of the SRD, I got over that. More or less.

But now, we've got 4e coming out, and from the looks of it, backwards compatibility isn't going to be all that high. So I'm left in kinda a bizarre situation; I like what I hear, but I still have no interest in adopting it.

Luckily, my main gaming group seems to feel more or less exactly the same, or they're even less interested in 4e than I am for other reasons. So it looks like I won't be stuck either having to upgrade or having to stop gaming with my group.

But still; I'm not ready. Maybe if 3.5 had never happened... but honestly, even then I think I'd be saying more or less the same thing. I haven't played the heck out of 3e or 3.5 yet, and I still feel like it's a really robust system, now with tons of options, and I'm not that thrilled about starting over from scratch with a new system, having PHB races and classes and not much else to go on for quite some time. Screw that. Give me my illumian duskblade or whatever other esoteric new concept that a mature system can produce, not yet another dwarf fighter just with new edition rules.