Building on my earlier comment, I wonder if that's the same for most people?
That their "favorite" edition is the one that they played during their teenage years?
Most people? Can't speak to that. For me, certainly not the case.
2e hit right in my "gaming prime" - loads of free time, age of discovery, people to play with - but it's not my preferred edition. I like it, I remember it {mostly} fondly, but as a game it doesn't push the buttons the way 4e does, for me.
And I was super optimistic going in to 3.x - what a disappointment that turned out to be (for me - hold your fire). Took me a while to realize it, and then longer to figure out *why* that was the case, but if I had to "go back" I wouldn't pick this in a thousand years.
But I've always been a forward-looker. The currency of Nostalgia has a poor exchange rate for me. That's probably a big reason why 5e doesn't appeal to me, and why 4e did (and still does).
You make a very good point about 1e vs 2e though. They are very different, if not in rules, then certainly in assumptions, and tone. The funny part is, the 2e books really downplayed that difference, especially in the foreword. Telling players that it's nothing more than a "cleaned up version of the rules that integrates what experienced groups are already doing" does a great disservice to some of the more fundamental changes that came with it. Sure, the rules may be largely
compatible, but the stated goals of play certainly were not. In fairness, the tools were largely still there to run 2e as you would 1e, especially if you had all the 1e books still, but without them, you would also be missing the guidance to play it as intended, so those tools seemed out of place, or lacking in context.
I played a fair bit of 1e as a youngster, but didn't read any of the books, as I didn't own them. I bought and read the
heck out of the 2e books, and so I had this odd disconnect with the way people I later played 2e with were doing it, and what the book was saying. The book promised all these wonderful adventures full of story and character, but I mostly had railroady meta-plots, murder-hobo dungeon crawls, or pseudo-medieval Shadowrun PvP festivals. Even after finding a game that offered what the book promised, I didn't understand why the experiences were so different, especially considering many of the players were the same. That realization would not come until many, many years and several editions later.