This has been an interesting discussion. D&D is not my preferred game and so most of the published campaigns mentioned I am not familiar with but there are a couple and I do have some opinions to share. Take of them what you will.
Rime is really the only one that I have practical experience with. IMO, it is easily one of the worst written campaigns I have ever seen in nearly 50 years of gaming. I'm not saying it can't be fun. I am saying that it is more likely to be frustrating rather than fun. The worst aspect of Rime's writing is that it is a bait-and-switch. The campaign sets itself up as a main villain focused adventure. The players are drawn to the area due to the reports of the unending winter or are already in the area and are responding to the threat of the unending winter, but the adventure in Rime has nothing to do with the unending winter and the title of the book is essentially "click-bait." The actual adventure is about a Duergar that no one's ever heard of and a flock of wizards that hardly anyone cares about.
While I think you can have a strong campaign without a strong villain, I do think you need a clear goal to have a strong campaign. Rime sets up a clear goal - stop the unending winter - and then completely abandons that goal. While the party that slogs it's way through the entirety of the campaign will ultimately stop the unending winter, they will only do so as a side effect. The real purpose of their action will be to secure the "Rime" that will open the lost Netherese city. Put simply, their confrontation with Auril is nothing more than a simple variation of "kill da monster, get da treasure." In this case, you are killing the monster to get the key to get more treasure. And kill more monsters. Yip. Ee.
My first exposure to Rime was as an observer rather than either a player or a GM. The GM (who was fairly new to the role) ran the adventure pretty much as written. The players spent several sessions looking for ways to end the winter and became increasingly lost and frustrated when they didn't find any. At one point, they uncovered clues that would lead them to the Druegar plot but they chose to set it aside and come back to it because it didn't seem to have anything to do with the "real threat." The campaign and the group ended shortly thereafter in frustration for everyone. Not good.
Some time later, I picked up Rime for cheap and had a chance to read it and then run it myself for a different group. Instead of letting the party wander around and hope they would stumble upon the Duergar plot and then pray they would follow it, I started them off with it and I tweaked the presentation to imply that it had something to do with Auril and ending the winter. I threw out Chapters 6 & 7 entirely and ran Chapter 4 BEFORE Chapter 3. It was in the Sunblighter's citadel that the party uncovered custom-tailored clues to locating Auril's lair and the reasons for her curse. Which led them into Chapter 5 and the climax of the campaign.
I also changed Auril's and Sunblighter's (note: I believe his actual name is Sunblight but Sunblighter sounds better to me so I changed it) goals to tie the two together and create multiple avenues to resolve the goal. One where Sunblighter gets what he wants (not good for Icewind Dale), one where Auril gets her way (not great for the Dale but the lesser evil), and one where the party defeats both (best outcome for the Dale).
I curated the various adventures in Chapters 1 & 2 to point the party towards the adventures that would naturally lead them to the Duergar. To be clear, there was plenty of wandering about and the party pursued some adventures while passing on others. I simply inserted one or more clues pointing to the "key nodes" that would lead them deeper into the duergar plot so the players could organically develop their own sense of direction. This, in turn, led them naturally to the climactic confrontation with Auril and ending her curse.
By establishing a clear goal at the beginning of the campaign, creating multiple paths to reach that goal, and sprinkling clues to those paths throughout the campaign, the party still had plenty of freedom to go where they wanted but a lot less frustration and aimless wandering.
The problem is that I did these things. I created a coherent plot for my players to engage with. I added the clarity and the clues that allowed my players to find their way to the adventure. The entire point of a published campaign is to provide the overworked GM with a coherent plot, clarity of purpose, and clues that they can tweak to better fit their players in the same way a tailor tweaks a suit to better fit the person wearing it. What I had to do to Rime was more akin to disassembling a suit entirely to resew a new suit with the fabric from the old suit. This is more work than if I had simply sewn the entire suit from fresh cloth right at the beginning.
Now fair credit, as a sourcebook for the Ten Towns and its environs Chapters 1 & 2 are pretty good. Plenty of interesting characters, adventure hooks, and details that players can engage with. But as a campaign or adventure, Chris Perkins and company utterly failed to deliver. Just to be clear. Rime is theoretically an adventure and not a sourcebook. It says so right there on the front cover: "Feel the touch of death in this adventure for the world's greatest roleplaying game." and again on the back: "A Dungeons & Dragons adventure for characters of levels 1-11." (Note: I added the punctuation and emphasis.)
Coming full circle to the topic of conversation, I think that in a good published campaign, you need:
1. A clear goal,
2. A coherent way (preferably more than one) to reach that goal, and
3. Sufficient structural support (in the form of clues, npcs, etc.) for the players to find their way.
Now, a strong villain can certainly provide one or more of these elements. Likewise, these elements work just as well with episodic campaigns as in serialized campaigns but they are easier to create in a serialized campaign. Ultimately, even a poorly written premade campaign or adventure can still be fun with sufficient application of creativity and effort by the GM and the players. A pre-made adventure or campaign that lacks the three elements above is going to require significantly more effort than a better written one and, in my opinion. would not be considered a good product.
