I've been DMing a 4e Neverwinter campaign, and at this point I'm just completely disillusioned with 4e. The combat takes so long that people lose interest and I feel like this causes roleplaying to fall to the wayside. Now, I'm completely willing to admit that this is my fault as a DM and I'm sure there are ways to "spice things up", etc. But at this point I want to get rid of the battlegrid. I feel like I am running a series of loosely connected Board Game-esque adventures, and that's not really what I think any of us are looking for in a game.

So the idea is to switch over to Pathfinder (which I realize has battlegrid rules for combat, but I'm just going to ignore AoO and possibly Flanking). The idea being that if we move away from the battlegrid, which seems like it would be much easier in Pathfinder, people will start to rely on the old imagination again...

Now that we are through all the background, here are my questions:

1. Has anyone done a switch like this? If yes, did you scrap your campaign and start a new one?

2. Am I just going to run into the same problems with Pathfinder?

3. Anyone have any other good D20 system suggestions?

4. Is there any quick games, etc. someone knows to have a group practice Roleplaying?

5. Players what would your reaction be if your DM wanted to switch editions?

EDIT: added last question

Thanks.