Funny enough, for years (right around when OSE took off), I've been toying in doing a grimdark 2e clone. 2e rules with 1e aesthetic.
We always interpreted the bard rules to mean you could overwrite that requirement, but in hindsight, we were probably doing it wrong and the bard section is a typo.
I'll invite the hate and just say I love the art and the overall trade dress of the original 2e books (revised, not quite as much) compared to the 1e core books, which I find pretty offputting.
I did for a while in my long term 1e campaign I ran starting in the 80s but eventually decided to drop it. Contorting things to make opportunities for necessary expensive mentors for assassins and clerics of a specific god was possible (I did so in Nulb when the party was doing the Temple of Elemental Evil) but not something I really liked for free agent D&D adventurers in a sandbox world as the party dropped the Temple to head to the Wild Coast and do slaver stuff then dropped that to go to Greyhawk. It constrained a lot of potential storylines and forced some that I was just not interested in.
You won't get hate from me. After all, this is hanging on my wall
Of all the AD&D PCs, how many went through In Search of the Unknown and happened to have that happen? IIRC, that's the only place that had magic fountains. Castle Amber had a meal that could do that (provided you didn't eat one of the other deadly items), and there might have been one or two other adventures that had ways to increase stats. But man, you'd have to have the stars align to just so happen to go through all of those, and to have the right stats increased, to meet those requirements.
Magic fountains were in the DMG. It didn't say what the fountain would do, but the tricks appendix did include a secret door to them.
Weren't there some sort of magical fruits in the Desert of Desolation series? Maybe in the Lost Tomb of Martek.
