I just watched Bloodshed II and realized that raven and id software did an outstanding job on creating Quake 4.

At first glance they made the game much slower than Q3 was. That's good. Playing Q3 didn't require you to think about forthcoming situations in your game, the fight was intense and demanded aiming, timing and movement action at once, all the time. The only thing you thought of was the item you should pic up AFTER the fight.

In Q4 the concourse of the athletes got more important. Because of the slow weaponswitch you had to have the right weapon in your hand, know the exact path of your enemy (granted, that's hard with broken soundsystem) and when you are going to approach the opponent. You had to think of many things BEFORE fighting, because they slowed down the fundamental mechanics, powered up some weapons and thus raised the skill bar.

THAT'S RIGHT, don't demand it, you didn't like the game because it got HARDER for die-hard quakers and introduced some elements of (validly popular) games like Counter-Strike.

I don't want to start another Q3>Q4 discussion, but i want to know what you think of the community (esr) speeding up Q4 physics. Do the ones who ranted about Q4 being 'slow' actually play 1.3, at a constant basis?

No, they can't make it faster, that would ruin the little bit of gameplay that's left.