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The Basic Psionics Handbook is excellent, and quite an improvement on all versions of 2e psionics IMHO, as it completely eliminates power checks as a mechanic. (If by "mad" you mean "multiple-ability dependent," the PX1 version of the psionicist uses only Int and Wis as prime requisites.) I...

I'll let a druid shift from an owl into a bear or vice versa, but not both at once.

Last I checked, paper, eyeballs, and literacy all still exist.

No, they don't, because I never just say that I want to run D&D. That would be asking for confusion. Instead, I'll put up flyers in my local game shop advertising the campaign and prominently showing the edition that I want to run — with, like, a picture of the Red Box cover front and center...

What difficulties are you encountering? I've lived in small towns and big cities, and I've never had trouble getting a BECMI campaign off the ground.

If you offer three doors that all lead to the same quantum encounter, what happens when a PC peeks behind them with a divination? Well if there's nothing actually there, they cannot be permitted to do that — forcing any DM who didn't anticipate this to throw up a last-minute, BS anti-divination...

I'll go ahead and pull an excerpt from my own house-rules doc to provide what I hope can serve as an example.

That's how I handle it. (As I mention a couple of times in the comments on Dan's blog.)

Ever since I first heard about how alignment entered D&D — in Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign, the players organized themselves into Team Good and Team Evil and competed for treasure and territory; Gygax decided to use Law and Chaos in his Greyhawk campaign instead, because he was a Moorcock...

Having nonhuman main characters is a genre convention in fantasy that we owe to Baum, Burroughs, Lewis, Tolkien, Anderson, Moorcock, Brooks, &al., &al., &al.…

I've never left the hobby for any length of time, but 3.5 made me return to playing OD&D.

OP, have you seen the finale episode of David the Gnome? Holy gutpunching tearjerkers, Batman, I did not ask for these feels — not now, and certainly not as a Nick Jr watching tyke.

I started to lose interest when Chewie died at Sernpidal, and finally lost interest completely when Anakin Solo bought it fighting the Vong.

Tinkers, chemists, and inventors. It's an archetype that goes back at least to the ancient world (think Dædalus) but also suits antediluvian sword & sorcery settings. In D&D terms, the first alchemist class appeared in issue #2 of The Dragon, and there was a "techno" class in the Arduin...

Okay, fair enough.

If we're talking about old-school as a play-style — which, to folks who spend a lot of time discussing the history and categorization of RPGs, is not just some floating term with a definition that rests in the eye of the beholder, but rather a term of art with a pretty clear definition — it's...

Switch to group initiative. It's not like weakening the value of the Dex stat will be bad for game balance overall…

To me, the whole entire point of an RPG is that it can use something like simulation to subvert the structure of a story. Why do we want the rules of an RPG to help us accurately model "what would happen"? Because sometimes, narrative logic defies logic-logic and harms suspension of disbelief...

That only makes things more baffling. I can't think of a single mechanic, procedure, or tradition that is so ubiquitous as to constitute a hobby-/industry-wide blind spot. "Playing a character in a fictional milieu," maybe?

This is where I land. There are no game mechanics that the hobby as a whole should remove from consideration. Some game-designer somewhere could eventually find anything useful. The OP's question is frankly bizarre to me. It's like asking, "what instruments should musicians just not use anymore...