Even by the time my 4E players got their characters to 6th level, they were still unable to describe what their powers looked like. Ridiculous.
My group didn't suffer from that problem. At all. Then again, generally-speaking, we like to make
shi stuff up ourselves.
Personally speaking, I've come semi-full circle on Gygaxian prose. When I was first introduced to AD&D in high school, I didn't feel I needed EGG's prose style for inspiration -- that's what Tolkien, Moorcock, Gene Wolfe, hell, even Ray Feist were for. Though in retrospect, D&D's overall tone, it's gleeful smashing together of genre influences was inspirational, thought I probably wouldn't have admitted it at the time (back them I was more hung up on strict(er) genre emulation, which blinded me to some of D&D's more ludicrous charms).
But now, reading through the AD&D core books --since I'm running the game for the first time since the late 80s-- I've come to a new appreciation for EGG's prose stylings. I can see the wit, the humor, the intentional-seeming self-parody that studs the verbosity, obscurantism, and over-elaborate, stilted diction like gems in the pommel of a
+1 bastard sword.
I hope there's place for such strong, idiosyncratic voices in 5e -- just not in, for example, the section on combat initiative.