Rblademaster wrote:if by 3rd party publishers you mean homebrewing I'm inclined to agree.
By 3rd party publishers I mean companies like
Green Ronin,
Necromancer Games and
Privateer Press who have evaluated the GSL and refused to have anything to do with it. Click on the company name to read their statements - Necromancer's statement is particularly interesting for me since it indicates the 3e market isn't very good right now. That leads me to speculate that 4e really is taking hold, despite what you can observe in the forums. Which makes sense in a way, since the major forums have posters who have been playing for quite some time and many of those posters aren't converting. Homebrewing is a different issue - if you don't intend to publish, you can still do whatever you like.
Don't get me wrong, there are still
some 3rd party companies willing to publish 4e material, but most of them realise it's a potential risk and so far most seem to be fairly conservative about what they're producing. And the way the GSL is currently written, it's very much a bet the company proposition to sign it. And yes, you do have to send a signed document to WotC to use the GSL, that's just one of the changes, and by far not the most dangerous one for 3rd party publishers.
Thinking of new abilities would, I believe, easily upset balance.
I take the opposite view on that. There's already heaps of examples of what a particular power (or feat/ritual/magical item/etc) of a particular level should be able to do. And if you read through the powers of a class reasonably carefully you should be able to work out what the theme of that class is. So it shouldn't be that difficult to homebrew something which is balanced and appropriate for the game. There's even a 3rd party publisher who has produced a
feat and power generator program to help you with that, although IMO you can probably do better without it (or at best, just use it for inspiration).
That said, there are examples even in the PHB of powers which aren't balanced (the Ranger's Twin Strike is superior to any of the other at-wills a Ranger can choose, for example). And the first WotC published supplement which expands the powers available to a class (Dragon #364, which gives new powers for a Wizard) does give powers which are better overall than their PHB equivalents. So this is something you'd need to be very careful with, if you don't want to upset the balance of the game.
That and the fact that your max number of abilities is rather limited so to remain combat effective you can't really afford to make more roleplaying or interesting ability's. Something I personally find to be a bit of a shame but to people that don't dable in homebrewing anyway it's not to much of a problem.
If you're talking about class powers, the vast majority of them revolve around combat anyway. It's really only in the utility powers, feats and rituals that you get anything to help with roleplaying. And of those, rituals are the ones most likely to be used in that way. The nice thing about rituals in 4e is that anyone can gain them if they really want to, although some classes do have an advantage over others (especially Clerics and Wizards, who get the Ritual Caster feat as a class bonus).
The other thing is the way feats and skills interact in 4e. Characters get more feats as they level than ever before (at the rate of 6 feats per 10 levels), and training in a skill in 4e just means a character gets a +5 bonus, so it's not too hard to spend a feat on Skill Training if you want it. In fact, right now I recommend all Clerics (particularly Elven Clerics) spend the feat to get training in Perception, and later Skill Focus (Perception), since they are the only PHB class which can really focus on building Wisdom.
And I still dislike the overall feel of skill checks
Skill checks are a pain, that's one thing most 4e DMs seem to agree on. About the only good thing I can see about them is that they are easy for the DM to ignore, if he or she wants to. This is one area where the DM should be homebrewing, IMO.
I hear 4E is build on a system like World of Warcraft... now that is BRUTAL if you ask me. Is this true?
... well not really.. 
. Allthough open to DM abuse ofcourse. But thats pretty much the same in 3E and 4E although I believe the number of skills has been slightly reduced and generalised. Which I suppose is an improvement since it makes them more guidelines to specific actions then straight forward abilities you can roll for.