This guy rocks my socks. Go check out THIS POST on his blog. There’s a quote from it below.
Game Fans need to learn to promote their games without dissing everyone else’s. If you dislike an edition, a rule, or whatever, why spend your energy attacking it when you could spend your energy doing something awesome instead? Why are you wasting your energy on negativity? Attacking how someone else is having fun does nothing to make them think your fun is better, it becomes a case of you being an cockmongler and trying to ruin someone else’s fun. Seriously. Read that again. When you are being an edition or system warrior, you are trying to ruin someone else’s fun.
I don’t CARE what Edition you play. We’re all roleplayers, all geeks of one stripe or another and I take that as a compliment.
Basic? Great.
AD&D? Fantastic.
3.x/Pathfinder? Wonderful.
4E? Awesome. Me too.
RIFTS? Mouse Guard? Dresden? FATE? Fiasco? Warhammer? The list goes on and on.
I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU PLAY. IF YOU’RE AN RPG NUT LIKE ME, THAT’S THE IMPORTANT PART.
But for the love of all that is good and holy in the world, don’t come up to me and tell me how awesome your game is by telling me how crappy you think mine is. That does nobody any good. It’s also really, REALLY obnoxious.
And in summation, a quote from one of MY FAVORITE GAME SITES EVER (seriously. Go look at this guy’s stuff. It’s amazing):
Rolpunk (one L, no E) is about pure, stripped down, no BS tabletop gaming. It’s about taking your game back to its bare bones roots: play a character, chuck some dice, period. It’s about not letting other people tell you how to play your games. It’s not about telling other people how to play their games, either; don’t be that fascist. Don’t drink the Kool-Aid, man, not other peoples’ and especially not your own. It’s about having fun, because if you’re not having fun you’ve discovered the only way possible to do it wrong. It’s about embracing the do-it-yourself ethic of the hobby and sharing your stuff, even if it’s just with your own game group. But it’s not about rejecting stuff, dismissing stuff out of hand because of whatever pretentious filters other people have set up to dictate what’s cool and what’s not cool. Screw them. Reject attitudes, not games. It’s about accepting the potential of everything, salvaging what works for you and ignoring the rest. It’s about shaping your own identity as a gamer, about letting your group and your campaign and the rules at your table take their own form based on your creative needs. Don’t be a game sheep.
The Action Point 
Thanks for the kind words!
Exactly.
I almost feel that I must have missed (or had) some critical, formative experience, and as a result I’m separated from the edition war mindset. I was so glad to find DnD as a 10 year old, so excited to start writing and playing, so grateful to have a gang of chuckleheads who’d let me send them into dungeons and kill them with spiders. I wanted, and still want, that experience, and I’ll use the best toolset for whatever story I’m aiming to tell.
I do think that part of what drives people to wardom is the positive associations they have with a specific set of rules, and a perception that the existence of a new or different ruleset is an implicit judgment of their own affections. Certainly the militant “Oldschooler” approach seems to be somewhat sourced in that, which as an oldschooler who embraces 4e I still find strange.