The D&D Game was greatly impacted by the popular fantasy authors of the time when D&D was first being developed. Among those are Tolkien and Moorcock. Tolkien's fantasy revolved around a colossal war between forces that were unmistakably good and those that were unmistakably bad. Moorcock's stories focussed on a similar conflict between forces of law and forces of chaos. Law and chaos was kind of a re-imagined good and evil that allowed in some moral ambiguity. Just because Elric worshipped a chaos god did not necessarily make him a bad guy. D&D reflected these authors by having an alignment system. They incorporated both Good versus Evil and Law versus Chaos building a kind of crazy set of alignments and matching cosmology. This was spread throughout the game and many abilities and spells focussed on this. And because so mechanics focussed on this divide it forced certain questions to be asked.
Is a merchant who swindles people evil? Can a paladin detect that? If he is evil is it okay to kill him? It is okay to kill goblin women and children because they are evil? Can a goblin child really be considered evil? Is evil a learned behavior? Is it right or wrong to scan a town for evil and then kill anyone who is evil? You should be able to ignore complex moral issues when you play D&D, but the mechanics actually force you to consider them. Fiction has the luxury of glossing over these issues, but in an RPG you have less control of how things progress and can be forced into these questions by the actions of players.
When a person picks an alignment it often too much about class requirements and how alignment based magical abilities will effect him. Personality of a character doesn't really need any sort of alignment axis in order to be defined or developed.
So fourth edition reduced the dizzying array of alignments to 5: Lawful Good, Good, Evil, Chaotic Evil, and Unaligned. But who cares? There aren't any alignment based effects so alignment has no effect and has become something that only affects army formation in the miniatures game. They essentially removed this element from the game, and put in some vestige to keep fans from complaining.
Personally I am not necessarily for or against the inclusion of alignment. I don't like 3rd edition alignment because so much of the game forces it's use and I don't like fourth edition because it removes it as an option.
So what would I do? Since 'good versus evil' is often a fantasy element and is tied to so much of the source material I would keep alignments with a Good, Evil, and Unaligned. You don't really need more. Some people may argue that their characters outlook can only be characterized by Lawful Neutral or Chaotic Good, but who cares. Roleplay your character how you want, the alignments only matter for alignment based magical effects. Everyone is Unaligned excepts characters who have divine power. Their alignment is based on the alignment of their deity. Angelic creatures are good while Devils, Demons, Slaads, and so on are Evil. Undead are also all evil. All alignment based powers treat everyone as neutral. This greatly reduces the power of many spells and abilities like Smite as they become anti-undead, anti-demon abilities. This makes evil a fundamental force of the universe and not a moral puzzle. You can even have interesting elements like Evil characters that are actually good like a demon who feels compassion like Angel the vampire or a character like Elric of Melnibone who draws power from Chaos but mainly does battle with the powers of Chaos. You can also have clerics of a good god who are corrupt.
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While it is true that the original nine alignments were limiting---largely because once you had chosen one of them---it was assumed that your PC would need to stay within the strict parameters of that alignment with every action. Many PC's chose one of the Neutral alignments as a result, since they had the most flexibility and least penalties for varying choices in moral situations.
This was also difficult when a PC/Role-Player was confronted with a challenging moral dilemma. Too often PC's would be penalized for making difficult moral choices. So often Role-Players would simply fall back on the alignment parameters and in order to dictate the decision.
The challenge for both the DM and the Role-players is to embrace difficult moral decisions, and not automatically be penalized for resulting actions.
A good example would be a Paladin who kills an incredibly powerful villain who is momentarily incapacitated. Perhaps his order does eschew him, but he gains the respect and faith of the villains former victims. In fact there are many PrC's that can either exchange or reward Paladin's who make decisions like this: Holy Liberator (Complete Divine), Grey Guard (Complete Scoundrel).
I liked that the 3.0/3.5 alignment system tried to show that there could be negative consequences for acting against type---but I think there should also be rewards when the choice is warranted. Though a PC should be discouraged from making strongly varying decisions as well.
I didn't know that 4.0 dropped Alignment based powers/effects. Yet another reason I am hesitant to switch...
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