EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Since you are asking for opinions, rather than objective analysis:
I'm not someone who is particularly fond of 5e. I've made that fairly clear around here; just saying it now to lay my cards on the table.
From my perspective? 5e's popularity has literally nothing to do with its structure or design, other than because it could leverage the "it's mostly like 3e" which most veteran players knew pretty well.
Almost the entirety of its popularity is down to five fundamental things, again, in my not-as-humble-as-it-should-be opinion.
1: It arrived at a time when the post-Great Recession recovery was in full swing. People had disposable income and were ready to spend. This is by far the most important factor. Had it launched even like three years earlier, even if it were 100% identical, it would not have done nearly as well.
2: Massive, massive, massive free advertising from a huge swathe of sources. TV shows, the arrival of the podcast era, the explosion of YouTube channels, etc. A constant influx of 100% free marketing is an almost indescribably huge boost.
3: The (relative) fall of Pathfinder. PF1e got unwieldy. It hit its own "ehhh...rules have some problems" era pretty much exactly when 5e was launching. It wasn't dead by any means and there were genuinely reasons to think PF1e was going to linger longer than it did. But it was long in the tooth, with an underlying system pushing 15 years old.
4: WotC scaled back nearly everything, working off a skeleton crew (remember: they didn't publish any conversion documents AT ALL for something like 2 years because ONE PERSON was on jury duty), so even the glacially slow pace meant profits were way up.
5: 5e strongly resembles 3e. That means it had, effectively, a built-in customer base. It is not 1:1 identical to 3e, not in the least. You absolutely do need to translate stuff, and a LOT of the content from 3e just can't be ported over because 5e doesn't have mechanics to suit. But the engine, the chassis, the beating heart of the system? Fundamentally almost identical to 3e.
I do think their policy of "nearly every book should offer meaningful content for nearly every kind of buyer" is a good business move, but that has little to do with the edition's popularity, so I left that out of the above. Likewise, I don't think 5e is even remotely as simple as its advocates claim it to be--because the vast majority of its advocates are old hands who already knew 3e extremely well and thus could generalize like 80%+ of their prior knowledge without issue. 5e is almost as complex as 3e was, saving in some areas and splurging in others, and is definitely NOT a simple game. Maybe--MAYBE--you could argue that it's the simplest edition of AD&D. I'm not entirely sure I'd agree, but it's at least a position one could reasonably argue. It is not, at all, a simple game in general, because no version of AD&D has ever been simple, and even the many flavors of BD&D were still fairly complex beasts, they just had good introduction sequences. (That would be like saying that a grand strategy game like Crusader Kings III is "simple" merely because Ireland presents a nice, safe, relatively low-difficulty tutorial area!)
So...yeah. That's my two cents. I hope it's useful to you, but I can't promise that it will be.
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Separately from the above:
It sounds like you're an old-school gamer with distinctly, and pretty thoroughgoing, old-school tastes. 5e almost certainly will not offer that experience. Trying to force baseline 5th Edition D&D As Produced By WotC to be that experience is, most likely, going to be fairly miserable for you as a GM, and if you're going for it as a player, you're unlikely to find it. As others have mentioned, there are 5e-compatible products or alternative game lines that are tailored to suit such tastes, so if you're comfortable with third-party products (3PP), you may still find "5e"* has something to offer you.
But, in general...you're going to have to come to some kind of understanding with the idea that gamer tastes today are different from gamer tastes as you knew them in the D&D of yesteryear. Folks like races that offer distinctive features, because races without distinctive features become little more than rubber forehead aliens to them. Folks like classes that offer obviously useful abilities, or with abilities that clearly change or shape play in some way. That does not mean they do not want to engage in thinking, it means that they like having some thing to (mentally) grasp, in addition to being creative with other tools (such as equipment, potions, and environmental stuff).
If that feels like a video game to you...well, your feelings are yours, I can't change them and you're entitled to feel however you feel about things. But maybe it would help to try to approach things with an open mind, seeing this as a different way to go about roleplaying, rather than seeing it as a wrong way to do so. That, rather than being "like a video game", this is simply baking in some tools for players to grasp onto, and using those as carrot (or stick, for monster mechanics) to entice things in particular directions. Folks still do wild, harebrained, crazy $#!+. There's a meme out there about how D&D parties are viewed by non-D&D-player folks as all DOUR and SERIOUS folks on an EPIC ADVENTURE full of CHIVALRY and (etc. etc.)......when actual D&D parties are better described as, and I quote, a "dysfunctional adopted family of bisexual disaster kleptomaniacs".
Things change. Maybe you won't ever be super on board with what they've changed into. But maybe, if you find the time to let the game be itself, you can find ways to enjoy it even though it isn't what you think of when you think "D&D". That's more or less where I had to end up, as someone who is an avowed 4e fan and thus felt very, very badly treated during the "D&D Next" (so-called-)playtest that produced 5e.
*I, personally, really REALLY dislike the usage of "5e", only and exactly the symbols "5e", to mean literally any product ever made which happens to use the same baseline rules but built for a different purpose. Because it is EXTREMELY confusing when one person refers to "5e" and they mean "the rules as published by WotC" and another says "5e" and they mean "a vast swathe of 3PP that has little if anything to do with the game WotC published" and a third says "5e" and they mean "my re-interpretation of the game published by WotC with a stack of house rules nearly as thick as the Player's Handbook" and a fourth says "5e" and THEY mean "the franken-game I cobbled together from the rules as published by WotC, two VERY specific 3PP lines and ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE 3PP, and my extensive homebrew". Doubly so because everyone acts like everyone else HAS to be using the term precisely the way they are, and thus endless time-wasting side arguments crop up over what it means. NATURAL LANGUAGE, IT'S JUST THE ABSOLUTE BEST, INNIT???
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