Ravenloft was an answer to CoC, yes, but as you points out above, here nothing to do with VtM (VtM might be influenced by Ravenloft, not the other way around), regardless of who was "there".
Pumpkins and potatoes are nothing to do with eras, they are (at least on earth) to do with geography. There were plenty of people in the medieval era eating potatoes, they just weren't in Europe.
And I can't agree with saying that medusas or minotaurs are not medieval - medieval people still...
Yes, and you know people are talking about the campaign setting, not the two modules. (The second which doesn't even sync up with the first one, let alone the later setting). But you are persisting with this for some reason.
Is your pedantry in service of a point or just to annoy people? You know exactly what people mean when they say "Ravenloft" and its not a Crawfordian dodge like you're trying to do here.
This is quite frankly the most terrible and uninspired thing that WotC has done to the much-abused corpse of Ravenloft. Slotting in the works of Lovecraft in the most ham-fisted way, not to mention the thematic inconsistency of these works and the D&D cosmological set up (Cthulhu doesn't work...
He also wrote probably the worse characterisations of both Mordenkainen and Dalamar that I've ever seen. (Dalamar does not "raid the surface folk" Greenwood, where the hell was your editor?)
You've been corrected on this falsehood once before yet keep posting it, so I'll say it again: the Summer of Chaos and its consequences were Weis and Hickman's idea, not TSR.
(And the decade reference, are you talking in universe or out of universe? Cos Summer Flame is set 30+ years after the...
I honestly don't get it myself. Pretty much D&D through every edition has worked way better in 1-10 range than above it, so I have no idea why people want to speed-run to the unplayable part. (And then complain that their campaigns fall apart)
My reaction to the whole "1 and 2 are not real levels" is honestly the whole "these go to 11" scene from Spinal Tap. If you're meant to start at level 3...it should be level 1.