Celebrim
Legend
Yet, 2e came out in '89 and it was hardly different at all. ::shrug::
Which made a lot of people at the time really upset. Very little that people had been complaining about was addressed. Dragons for example had been a hot topic of contention for a long time, and at least an attempt was made at that. I think it says something that we never officially adopted 2e and continued play in 1e, but that most of the DMs in the group did adopt 2e dragons and did start using something very close to 2e's simplified initiative system. But at the same time, many things that most of weren't upset about were changed.
To me there is a strong parallel between 2e and 4e, and between 3e and 5e, in that in both cases by the time the even numbered edition came out a majority of the community was chaffing about weaknesses in the rule set and was ready for a revision. But, in both the cases of 2e and 4e, the actual revision we got mostly addressed issues that we didn't have and reflected instead a very strong internal vision by the company as to how the game should be played and in addition to rules changes there were wholesale lore changes that really no one had demanded and felt more like some DMs house setting imposed on the whole community.
And in both the cases of 3e and 5e, the edition that we then got was much closer to what the core community had expected the even numbered edition to actually look like.
Of course the parallel isn't perfect. 2e can be faulted for not killing enough sacred cows and 4e faulted for perhaps killing too many of them, but at least at the time the 2e books came out I remember our group looking at the rules and mostly going, "Why did they do THAT?" and "Why do we still not have good rules for THIS?".
The only good thing we liked about 2e was that it was backwards compatible enough that we could pick and choose which good ideas (or things we thought were good ideas) to import into our games, and that ended up being a decent amount so we probably ended up liking 2e far more than we did at first glance.