I'm right there with you. Later D&D 4e books were better (Mordenkainen's Magnificent Emporeum is really good), but still not in the class of AD&D books for sheer "pull it off the shelf and give it a read" fun.
The flip side is that a great deal of the fun in reading AD&D books came at the expense of good, clear, understandable rules. How many rules in AD&D were ignored, forgotten, or lost because they were obscure or difficult to find buried in fun prose?
At least for adults, I don't think a great many rules were ignored because they were incomprehensible. I would guess that most ignored rules were ignored because (1) they were more complicated that they were worth and/or (2) the DM wanted to do something else.
I came to AD&D in grade school, so -- yes -- I'll admit that there were plenty of rules that I ignored or misinterpreted because I didn't understand them. But I think kids working out what the complicated rules mean is part of the RPG experience. Sure, they'll play it "wrong", but who cares? Kids aren't stupid -- if their "custom variant" sucks badly enough, they'll read the rules again and come up with something different.
And let's remember that 4e uses some super-dry language, but it's not like it's easy to understand. Players have to remember a ton of key words and special language for the powers to make sense. (For example, if you don't remember the technical meaning of "Hit" and "Effect", huge numbers of precisely described powers become really confusing.) For players who have trouble remembering these terms, a more prose-like approach could actually be
less confusing than the technical writing approach. It is more important for players to understand the book than for the book to provide precise answers to "corner case" situations.
Maybe I'm in the minority here because I don't really care about convention play, but I think having all the tables in the world playing RAW is totally overrated. I don't propose making the rules
deliberately obscure, but I don't think it's a big deal if different groups interpret the rules differently.
-KS
P.S. Also, the comic illustrations in the original AD&D DMG were funnier than 98% of the D&D comics published since. D&D has been taking itself too seriously for several editions now...