I'll reckon it's because 4e "wizards" don't have "spells" in the same sense as other editions.
Duh! I brainfarted. Thanks for pointing that out, Doom.
I thought for some reason he was saying that there were asshole players in all editions, but 4e, which made me go "huh". For the record, I think that is totally true, that there are assholes playing any and all editions of the game.
My personal experience in moving on from 3rd ed is twofold, however: (1) from a game play standpoint, I was just tolerating the math and multiple modifiers and recalculating all the skills you put ranks in and all the nitpicky "do your taxes" aspects of the game, and one day woke up wondering "why the fuck do I care about all this shit?" as I stated before. This part has to do with the game's design and I had no assholes at my game table to speak of, BUT the wake up call came in part from my discussions online, which leads me to (2).
(2) the discussions online surrounding 3rd edition became gradually all about the rules, and nothing but the rules. Anything and everything was scrutinized from a mechanical standpoint, and the circle-jerking, though initially confined IME on boards like ENWorld spread all over the gaming internet, down even to Okay Your Turn where I was hanging out for the most part in those years. You literally couldn't have a discussion about anything 3rd ed related without having it devolving into a discussion about rules and game balance and twinks and bullshit.
That obviously carried over in the design of 4e, but for some people still holding on to 3rd ed and Pathfinder, like the denners in some strange "everything sucks and needs to be fixed" way, or others who keep whining about stuff like the fighter versus wizard and how the game is broken blah blah blah, that outlook on "the game are the rules and the rules the game" is still very much alive, apparently, and I don't think it can just be blamed on a "misunderstanding" of the 3.0 rules. I think the game's design involved elements which these OCD rules lawyers CharOp types just held on to immediately, which led to the understanding that CRs are RULES, not guidelines, that if it's spelled out in the book you can do it, if it doesn't say it you can't, etc etc.
All the bullshit displayed on the Wizard v. Fighter thread, basically.
So if 3rd ed is far from being the only edition with its assholes (one could talk about the 1e DMs who thought Tomb of Horrors was the basic game mode and that you should screw the players at every turn, the thespian types playing 2e railroading the hell out of you, and the 4vengers, obviously), 3rd ed sort of breeds and encourages its own special breed of assholes, so to speak.