Remathilis
Legend
You don't know what you missed.
In those days a campaign was more than a series of adventures. Players would often play 6 or 7 days a week. The main game would be on one night, and on others the dm would run one or more players through side adventures, there were several ongoing plots running at once, and people often ran several characters in the same campaign. A few shorter adventures on off nights and pcs were close to the same level as the veteran pcs. Besides, old school games were generally about exploring, overcoming challenges, and a combat or two thrown in.
even if you did have to hide behind the mage for a few sessions, you're talking about 30 minutes out of An 8 hour game session.
See, this isn't a edition-based point; I could do this same thing in any edition, but I'll compare experiences.
I played in a group in HS where there were 5 of us, everyone ran a game and everyone played in everyone elses game. We played as often as school/homework/jobs would let us. Our games very very story intensive and role-play intensive; NPCs to meet, plots to foil, places to explore. We also didn't do a lot of pointless combat either and the bulk of our XP was story-reward. Battles were EPIC insofar as if we were going to have a fight, it was a plot-related battle or an occasional goons-come-to-battle you moment. No random encounters here! Oh, and there was the occasional module for gold, magic, and some XP mining.
But I don't think what you described is what I "missed". There are a lot of good things I recall carried from 2nd to 3rd and even into 4th (but someone 4e is mutating them, and I don't know why. That's another thread.) They carried in Star Wars and M&M and even our brief stint in Vampire. I loved my PCs, I can tell you everything about my handle's namesake not because he was the 24th elven thief I rolled up but because he was the first!
Anyway, we had different experiences, and that colors our opinions of things like this.