That's sort of what I was afraid of when I discovered that it was basically a blend of 3.x and 4e; sure, you lose some of the annoying stuff from 4e, but you also lose a lot of what made 3.x entertaining. My opinions is generally 3.5e > 5e >4e, with the reasoning being that in spite of 4e and 5e being less unbalanced, 3.5e still offers better opportunities for unique and interesting situations (in no small part because of how bizarre and unbalanced it could be), and in part because a lot of the balancing is done by making everything homogenous, samey, and casual EZmode akin to playing Skyrim on low difficulty vs. Dark Souls (huehuehue mostly kidding here). So I guess I'd say 5e for introducing people to DnD and maybe more mundane hack'n'slash adventure modules, 3.5e for anything that'll last longer than a few sessions/session-equivalent length and for more experienced players., and 4e if people want to play a MMO where the subscription fee is dealing with the other jackasses in your group instead of murdering your wallet.
TBH if I had my druthers 5e would have been a different sort of update of 3.5 with a couple difference balance dynamics: one which is basically 3.5 with the broken and stupid problems (Truenamer, Monk, ferex) fixed akin to how many houserules set things right; and then a couple different sets of guidelines for balancing games for high-tier high-magic parties vs. low-tier low-magic parties; and probably something akin to the book of weeaboo fightan magic from 3.5 (only more so) to add martial and skillful classes or class variants which have bullshit on par with primary casters, just done through non-spell bullshit instead of spell bullshit, so that you can have a mixed party for high-level campaigns.