I think you're making a mistake in thinking that you can get people to objectively evaluate editions based on RAW prior to 3e. Because it wasn't until 3e came out that there was an accepted practice across the whole community of even trying to play the RAW or that the books had any more authority than the house rules that the DM had been playing with for 15 years (or, for that matter, than the 1e books). 3e shifted the mentality of the broader D&D community that migrated to it towards a mentality that had previously been the bastion of players who had migrated to games like Champions or GURPS - the idea that the rules were there to be learned and adhered to rather than just act as a collection of suggestions on how you could run your game if you chose to (and by the same token the expectation that the rules were coherent enough to be able to be used as written without needing to patch them up with your own duct tape and bailing wire - the perception of the latter drives the former, and vice-versa).
So people's memories aren't going to line up with what is clearly the case if you do as you say and look at the rules as written - 2e was a mess of a ruleset that ended up deadlier than 1e if you played RAW because the people who folded it all together and revised it didn't quite understand the impact of the changes they made. But it didn't matter because the community for the most part self-corrected and ignored the parts where they screwed up. Because nobody cared about RAW.
