I’m going to disagree here a bit. I could see arguing that it doesn’t help you, but I don’t think it fights you. We run social encounters wonderfully with the RAW tools. I realize not everyone can do that, but I can’t see how it fights you.
I have no comment about exploration as that is not a...
I’ll push back a little. The 24 monsters typically still have the flavor traits you speed of, they are just not called out. They are tucked into the stats. So mechanically the same or similar trait, just no name.
Though I miss them too.
They also often added interesting actions in many cases.
I don’t know where you live, but $150 +/- $30 can’t feed my wife and I with a class of bubbles or two in about 95% of restaurants in Seattle and this not a cheap market!
The DM would describe / narrate our characters being pushed-pulled-slid around and we imagined how that appeared. No different than any other movement really.
Is being pushed 10 feet really that more difficult to imagine than walking 10 feet?
Maybe that was the design intent but it sure worked well without a map or minis. We didn’t use either of those more in our 4e game than we did in our 1e game, maybe even less sine the rules were easier to follow.
We had the conversation before actually. It was an experiment. Our GM had heard that this style of boss monster works well. It did not. But perhaps it was just a poor fit for this particular combat as well.