Mostly the people I know consider 5E spooking arcane and complex...the people who play it.
The room in the market on the simpler side is likely much larger, and I think that trying to be more complex than D&D is a common mistake on the TTRPG industry.
There is a difference between these two things:
"Remove everything from the game which takes time to learn."
"Improve the game so that the things in it are easier to learn."
Unfortunately,
many MANY game designers today (not just in D&D/tabletop, but in video games as well) do not act as though they understand the difference between these things. They flatten all differences and remove all potential for depth, because that's the most efficient way to make a game easy to learn: make it
trivial to learn.
But when a game prioritizes simplicity over all else--when its design becomes reductionist
über alles--it necessarily gives up the things that give people a reason to want to stay. Simplicity alone is not better than complexity alone. What is required is
depth, which is (always!) difficult to design. Systems that are easy to learn, but difficult to master. Systems that are approachable for the apprentice
and challenging for the journeyman
and engaging for the master.
We don't need "simpler" games. We need
approachable games. Games that lure you in with easy, fast options, and then pull you just a bit further with a cool other thing that, now that you're invested in the easy stuff, sounds worthwhile to investigate. And then another. And another. And another. Until you've been playing for six years and know the system back to front because you
wanted to learn it, not because learning it was the
prerequisite for joining.
This is why I have always, ALWAYS advocated for the addition of a really, truly SIMPLE caster class. And the addition of a really, truly
deep (not just complex, because complexity merely for its own sake
is bad) non-magical class. An actually simple caster class would make it so much easier for new players to get into the game, lowering barriers, while also adding the appeal of "well...if
this is fun, what are the other casters like...?" And, likewise, having an actually, genuinely deep non-magical class would give folks who love Fighter characters but find the Fighter kind of dull (because...it is, by design, as lamented by Mearls himself) an opportunity to do something more engaging and intricate.
It's also why we should bring back some of the innovations of 4e. E.g., return to having static defenses instead of saving throws.* That rule change is one of the rare cases where making the system simpler ADDS depth, rather than removing it. Having all offensive actions be attacks means that support characters can now be made that equally benefit all other characters, regardless of how they contribute to combat. This makes the game overall more accessible (fewer things to remember, faster play) and gives an inroad for players who really love the idea of being supportive to their allies but who are bored to tears by the "Brother Bactine" stuff that tends to be how support characters get pigeonholed in D&D.
We absolutely, totally should go through and trim down a lot of the cruft in D&D. We should pore over it and identify the places where the rules, as they are, act as an impediment to getting into the game, and find ways to achieve very similar levels of
nuance, but with less
convoluted rules. Ideally, we should couple this with actual testing: work, with actual educators and with interested brand-new players, to find alternatives that are
testably easier to learn while preserving whatever nuance we can in so doing. The problem is, most of the time, people are hyper-protective of the parts of D&D that are especially crufty and forbidding to newcomers, and instead attack perfectly benign or even
helpful elements that are simply newer than the incredibly recondite stuff they've grown accustomed to.
* And TBH return to the old 3-save/defense system, rather than 6. It was a neat idea, but in practice it is kinda flawed, and adds a lot of complexity but very little nuance/depth. 4e's "best out of 2 stats" format was a good middle-ground between 3e and 5e on that front, since it preserves the "Strength
and Con can be important" while cutting the number of things you have to remember in half.
