I've been gaming since 1979, and 5e is one of the most rules-bloated systems I've seen. And I played Phoenix Command and Rolemaster for years.
The core system is simple, almost elegant, but when you empty the bottomless cesspit of feats, spells, class abilities, racial abilities, items, and 3rd-party drek over it, its a bloated, tedious mess.
As stated already, conflating rules with content is not the right way to assess these things. They aren't the same thing, and if you're reading my words and not accepting it, then you need to address that before you even try to deny the argument being made.
Ultimatwly, that bottomless cesspit isn't needed to play the game. Its not a "rule" that it has to be there.
Afterall, step back for a second and look at other games and what they really are at their core.
Mainline Pokemon for example has a ton of neat and intersecting content with lots of interesting interactions and choices to make, and its only grown over the years. It has so much content in fact, the developers don't (arguably can't) even put it all into the games anymore.
But you don't need all of that to play rock/paper/scissors. RPS is fun all on its own, no elaborate pretense required.
Theres a lot of reasons why dice games are fun, but the important thing is that DND, at its core, is a very simple dice game with a whole lot of extraneous
content layered on top.
That is why the game doesn't break down when you start removing that content, because the content isn't actually integral to the game being played.
As said, the illusion that all of this extraneous content matters is just that. It
should matter, mind, but it doesn't, and thats simultaneously one of the core issues 5e has, but also its single biggest strength.
Its only because the game doesn't actually break when you get rid of its crappy content that people keep sticking with it over anything else. Thats why its rules light.
After all, rules light is often praised as something that indicates a great flexibility to play out any kind of experience.
While people who don't know any better often make the mistake of trying to scramble the existing content to make 5e work for some other type of game (when in reality they should be making new content), the simple fact is 5e
can do anything precisely because it doesn't force you to do anything; the game does not break when you get rid of its content.
There are no rules being broken, because there is only
one.
One single rule is, by definition, rules light.
Should also be reiterated that, again, people reading what Im saying should actually
read what I'm
saying, and stop getting hung up on their preconceptions.
