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I think there is perhaps less willingness to abuse the rules as a player if you're going to be a GM soon. Obviously having a long-standing group isn't a universal experience but it might go some way toward explaining why I've never seen the bad behaviors I see attributed to players so often here.

I'm commenting on your interlocutor's attitudes toward players and rules.

I'd expect the greater problem was that they were players who dared to learn the rules and expect the game to be played by them.

Some GMs will feel more comfortable with things spelled out. Some will feel comfortable with more space in the rules. Some GMs will want something things codified and other things not. I never found 3e or its descendants all that hard to run because it was over-codified. That doesn't mean I...

Neither. Both. It depends. I think all those answers are true.

If pressed I'd say that it's easy to learn in spite of WotC's efforts not because of them but I think we've run that argument into the ground in another thread.

The people I know were older and it helped there were people around for them to ask questions of. I wasn't playing in the two new players' games but I fielded questions from both of them.

I know of three people who GMed for the first time in D&D 5e. Two of them were entirely new to the game when they started playing at a table I was running. The current edition isn't really that much harder to learn than previous ones.

"Get yourself a gold weapon" is only a change in strategy if the players know it's possible and/or necessary.

I think he's saying that presenting the PCs with creatures they cannot defeat is not the same as horror. As someone who has always found Ravenloft to be neither what I want from Horror nor what I want from D&D I don't disagree.

Especially when those players are also your friends. Doubly so when those friends are also sometimes your GMs.

We were able to play 1e without PC deaths and we've had at least one TPK in tier 3. The game is and always has been as deadly as the people at the table want it to be.

I have no doubt this is a problem. I am happy that two players who were newbies when they started at my tables have at least dipped their toes in the GMing pool and at least two others who were more experienced also GM. I hope they learned as much from me as did from the GMs I've played with.

Most of the people I game with are willing to GM though some are more comfortable doing so than others. GMing doesn't have to be especially difficult or time consuming while a campaign is going since a lot of the work of the campaign can be front-loaded and done before the first session. During...

I apologize. I misinterpreted the information I was finding. I should have taken more time and paid more attention. Tyrium seems to be an incorrect name for neodymium unless I am misunderstanding the Wikipedia redirect page. Many of its oxides are apparently vividly purple which would explain...

They are archaic words for respectively tungsten and neodymium. EDIT: I am wrong here about tyrium. Apologies.

You might need one set of dragons while I need a different set. It makes plenty of sense for WotC to provide a superset of dragons that includes both the set you need and the set I need while including the sets other DMs who are running different games from yours or mine need. None of that...

If one is running a mystery scenario the facts of the scenario need to be discovered. The mystery will likely be nearly impossible to solve without them. Some of those facts might qualify as setting information but I have to think the majority will not. Most setting information will not be...

I have played in a few games where the party's personal stories from time to time led to or through some setting thing the GM had just worked up. So long as we didn't feel as though the setting was more important to the GM than the PCs were that always worked out well enough.

The approach I've come to prefer is that it's a risk you have to choose. Some things will kill you and you more or less need to go looking to deal with those. The random stuff isn't likely to be a lethal threat. That is not a criticism of taking death entirely off the table. It is also not an...