A lesson I've learned over the years is that a game system only needs as many rules as are necessary to accomplish its goals.
That's why my favorite systems are, in order,
1: D&D
2: Og: Unearthed
3: Faery's Tale
Why those systems in that order? Because they each accomplish different goals in different ways.
D&D has two goals that I can see. The first goal is to be a lifestyle game that rewards extensive investment of time in world creation, character creation, and system mastery. The second goal is to be fight-porn. With those goals in mind, I think 4e is probably the best version of D&D out there, in that it strikes the best balance between the various competing interests involved in that goal set (You know, increased fine detail rewards system mastery, but slows fight scenes to a crawl, etc).
Og: Unearthed has the goal of being a fast, easy to play, single evening game, with hijinks and chaotic gameplay. As a result, its rules are simple enough to learn in a single evening and to use on your first play without difficulty, and they're designed to not get in the way of the largely player driven action. In a way, its a game that's very comparable to Paranoia, except tuned to one shot game play instead of lifestyle game play.
Faery's Tale is a game designed for children. Its also more about story telling than tactics. This means its rules are pretty simple, and most of its "special case" type rules are NOT mechanical advantages. They're things like "This character is friendly with butterflies, and butterflies will do them favors if they can." A rule like that would give certain ENWorlder's an absolute aneurysm if it were used in D&D, because it provides no guidance on what kind of favors a butterfly might agree to provide, or what a butterfly can even do. That's left to the game master to ad lib in the spirit of the game. But you know what? While a rule written in that style is a nightmare in a fight-porn game like D&D ("So, wolves do me favors. I gather the biggest pack of wolves I can and use them as cannon fodder versus the dragon. What?? Nothing says I can't!"), its entirely appropriate for a game like Faery's Tale.
So... this is all a roundabout way of saying that I'm not sure that OD&D is really the best call. It has nostalgia value, and that's worth something. I hate to say it, but if you're not looking for a lifestyle game and you're not looking for fight-porn, an entirely different system might be in order.
