Unless, of course, you're playing 2nd Edition, which removes the XP for "taking stuff", broadens the "killing things" into "defeating things", and adds items like "story goals" to the XP equation. As has been said before, there's nothing "sudden" about it. If you've noticed an upswing, blame it on the wearing away of tolerance levels from constant irritation.
This depends strongly on what the reviewer considers "roleplaying" to be. Often, these reviews thus have less to do with what the GAME is emphasizing in play than what the reviewer is emphasizing as his definition of "roleplaying". Roleplaying has very, very little to do with authorship; the tools and talents that make a good roleplaying game are not the same as those that make a good novel. Until something critical e.
As a tangent, it always bugs me to read a review of a game by someone who comments, as a positive trait, that they "almost never had to resort to the mechanics". That's like saying a car model is great because you almost never had to drive it anywhere. Your first word shouldn't be "while", which implies a contradictory following clause.
It should be "because". This sentence is tantamount to admitting your entire post is literally just an uninformed opinion. It would be like me saying "While I've never left the borders of my home state, I can't see that any nation could possibly be more civilized and enlightened than the United States. Well enough to write dozens of novels. In my experience, the system used has very little to do with style of play and the emphasis of the game. What matters is the GM's and the players' interests.
It isn't all that sudden. But for my tastes it is to long, too expensive, too complicated, too full of unreasonable rules and incapable of representing the sorts of things I want in my campaign: like a master swordsman who things twice before jumping off a thirty-foot wall. I just don't think that the class-level system is a good foundation on which to represent humans, although I am told that is is suitable for rabbits.
