A huge number of the Dragon articles in the 1970's and 1980's dealt with the game-design topic of "realism vs. playability". People were constantly trying to add new rules to make D&D more realistic in perceived ways, and the main barrier was how many rules made it no longer playable. This was the primary game-design goal for 20 years until the "balance" fetish came on the scene.
I subscribed to The Dragon during this period, and I really don't think that's a fair characterization.
I'm not sure "hey, here's 72 more polearms" is really realism per se, so much as it was indulging a segment of the gaming community's love of super-obscure weaponry. Columns like "The Whole Half-Ogre" or the Cloistered Cleric added more options, but since neither half-ogres nor spellcasting clerics exist in our world, I'm not sure either qualifies as realism. There were seemingly endless attempts to remake the bard and druid, but they were aimed at the goal of being more fun, not being more realistic.
(Which is, incidentally, where the "fetish" of balance comes from: Everyone at the table should have an equal amount of fun, not just be the sidekicks to the guy who got to play the super-awesome character. As a game design goal to sneer at, everyone having more fun is a pretty strange choice.)
Other well-remembered articles, like "The 7 Sentence NPC" (reprinted in Paizo's wonderful Dragon compilation), the 9 Hells and the incredibly influential "_____ Point of View" series were about fleshing out the game world in a way that was, again, about it being more interesting and more fun, not more realistic. (The 7 Sentence NPC in particular doesn't worry about things like realism, so much as it's about creating cool and memorable NPCs on the fly.)
In fact, in truth, I have a hard time remembering any articles from this period that were about more realism -- they certainly didn't make it into the Best of the Dragon anthologies -- and they certainly weren't a dominant design philosophy in the magazine.
The general NPC population all through 1E, 2E and BXCMI were in fact all classless ("normal men"; per 1E DMG, only 1 in 100 humans could attain a PC class).
Which, as a realism example, doesn't work either: Where did that number come from? What was it based on? I don't know that any philosopher, historian or sociologist of note would come up with a 1:100 ratio, even if they subscribed to the notion that only certain people are capable of extraordinary lives.
Members of a given race did not have identical attributes -- hit points varied, specifications for leaders with more hit dice always appeared, etc.
Also not realistic. Bullets do not have a harder time killing a general than they do a private.
Physical health certainly could decline with age if investigated closely (see Gygax's Dragon stats for Conan at different ages -- sure enough, his level & hit points go up to age 40, then decline after that).
And that's certainly present through 3E. I haven't seen an age chart in the 4E books yet (I have an 11-month-old, so protracted reading time is mostly a memory for me at this point), and if it's not, it should be added back in, and I'm sure will be by third party publishers and maybe even WotC as well.
Frankly, there's a jaw-dropping amount of revisionist history going on from the 4E camp this year. Your kind of observations don't remotely match what I know of early D&D, nor the reactions of people that I introduce it to at this time.
I've been playing since 1979, and my dad had photocopies of all of the original booklets in the house before then (which I pored over, even if I didn't have anyone to play with at first), and your memories don't match mine, either.
I think it's a little much to accuse others of revisionist history, based on your declarations of what sort of content predominated in the first 15 years of The Dragon.
