Orius
Legend
Like I said before, 2e isn't really terribly different enough from 1e that it gets a lot of people worked up about it. There's pretty much 5 flavors of D&D: Original, Basic, AD&D, 3e, and 4e. Original, Basic, and AD&D are all similar enough that they tend to blend together, and back in the Golden Age, lots of people were mixing Basic and 1e AD&D anyway. It's like if these variations of D&D were all ice cream, Original, Basic, and AD&D would all be variants on chocolate, there might be sutble differences but underneath, there's still that same chocolate flavor.
As for D&D losing something in during 2e, well it's pretty much the slow death of TSR from the time of Gary's departure to TSR's bankrupcy. Instead of everything happening all at once in 89, it was stretched out over a period of 10 years. I wasn't playing the game when most of it happened, and learned about much of it later on but here's what seems to me to be the key developments:
-Gary's departure did not occur on the best of terms. Some of his fans I think were aware of what happened, and that was the first blow against TSR.
-Late 1e products were not as well received as earlier products in the line, particularly stuff in the Greyhawk line. Just look at the reception of Castle Greyhawk, or some of the other modules that were produced around '87 or '88.
-The release of 2e wasn't universally embraced. Some people were disappointed that it didn't break enough with 1e, while others saw no reason to update. It didn't help that TSR continued to print some 1e stuff for a while. And there was the growing Basic/AD&D split. Basic and 1e had from what I understand a lot of similarities at first. But during the 80's the two lines diverged, and by 2e, there were some noticable differences that a little work had to be done to convert between the two. There's also the deletions of stuff like demons and devils, assassins, and so on, some of which was seen as an attept to pander to moral guardians.
-The Forgotten Realms setting eventually supplanted the Greyhawk setting as the vanilla AD&D world. This happened because of several reasons, I think. Greyhawk fans seemed to have largely run their own homebrews in the setting and did not like some of the stuff that was published in 2e (Greyhawk Wars for example). FR was seen as being really big on the changes to 2e that made the game more family-friendly etc, look at the events of the Time of Troubles and such. Though I think some of the people writing stuff at TSR at the time maybe felt more comfortable using FR rather than Greyhawk, because Greyhawk was Gary's personal world, IDK.
-The glut of settings which are fondly remembered by 2e enthusiasts. At the time, TSR wanted to capture the same success they'd had with Dragonlance and FR, so they cranked out a bunch of different campaign worlds. This though divided the base which was already at the time divided into Basic, 1e, and 2e players. Now you had FR players, Dragonlance players, Dark Sun players, Ravenloft players, Planescape players, all dividing up the player base (which was already shrinking) and fracturing TSR's revenue. There was some overlap, but enough gaps to cause lasting breaks.
-TSR's overzealous protection of its IP in the days of electronic bulletin boards and the early days of the Web. I don't see many people talking about this these days, since it's now about 15 years and more in the past, but it seems to have done some serious harm to what was left of the playerbase. When I first starting discussing D&D online back in 1999 or 2000, it was still very much in memory and people were still referring to T$R (They $ue Regularly). It certainly seemed to hae driven even more people away from 2e.
-By the end, the underlying system underneath 2e was really starting to show its age, and newer games were chipping away at the fan base.
So by the time TSR tanked, things were not well, even though at the time I really wasn't ware of what was going on. After WotC bought TSR, there were definitely efforts to patch things up again. The bridges that had been burned with Gary and Dave had been rebuilt, and classic modules were revisited. There was also an attempt to revive the Greyhawk line but it seems to me the damage that had been done in early 2e was pretty deep, and FR's dominance was at that point complete. Early 3e I think was doing a fair job of rebuilding the playerbase, but I also think some of TSR's actions made people suspicious of anything WotC did, particularly after being bought by Hasbro. Some of the things that happened around the start of 4e (the hype leading up to it with the negativity towards 3e, the big mess over .pdfs and piracy that ended up in the removal of older edition material, the whole licensing deal with 4e) did some more damage of it own to fracture the fan base too, unfortunately.
