I realize this may be based more on nostalgia rather than being 'better' or 'more fun'.... but I miss the days of hoarding every single item/weapon/armor you could come across. Then at the end of the day putting it all in a pile and casting Detect Magic. The few items that would glow you would keep.
Then came the decisions.... did you wait until you could get some 'safe' time so the Magic User could cast Identify a baziilion times... or did you 'risk it' and just put that ring on anyway..... Fortune Favors the Bold!!
This is the kind of change (and every edition brings changes like this) that comes about, because an increasing proportion of D&D's players - and perhaps more importantly, designers - have played a lot of D&D in the past. To many such players, those things they once found interesting (solving the logistical challenge of bringing all those copper pieces or all that valuable but heavy furniture out of the low level dungeon) or exciting and mysterious (casting detect magic and identify to isolate and evaluate magical weapons and other items) they now consider mundane. Such challenges are more likely to be seen as tiresome speed bumps on the road to ultimate PC ascension. We, the players, have long since found the perfect solution to that issue (even if our new characters haven't).
Players new to the game today are much more likely than new players of the last generation to have encountered D&D-inspired computer RPGs. In these the identification of magical items is often automatic or at least trivial and quickly accomplished. Many of these players would consider relatively prolonged engagement in such activities as quaint, at best. To begin with, that is. Soon it would simply become tiresome, as it apparently has done for many veteran D&D players.
Well, the game has changed. Even with all these changes D&D is still too much like OD&D for some people. For some people it has changed too much from its roots. That's got to be a frustrating line to try to walk for the developers.
Oh, I'm sure it is. Here's what I wish they'd do. I wish they would be more conservative with changes to the rules that arise from wanting to provide convenience to experienced players or new players whose prior game experience might be primarily computer-related (and I play just as many computer games as tabletop games, so that's not a slur).
I think, for D&D to be the classic RPG, it should constantly and consistently offer new players the kinds of challenges and rewards that experienced players so often fondly recall. Because the fondly remembered things that new editions exorcise on the altar of appeal to the lowest common denominator are sometimes the very things that have made (and still make) D&D so great and so unlike anything else.
