2E artwork was all wrong. I saw a quote somewhere that someone was turned off the D&D Rules Cyclopedia because it was full of 2E era artwork. I thought back and realised that this was one of the things that irked me about that book too. It's easy to underestimate how the artwork affects the atmosphere of the game, and it can be understood by a comparison of the 1E Monster Manual II versus the 2E Monstrous Compendium.
The 2E DMG was intentionally crippled - they left chapters of material out for later publication in DM's supplement books, meaning that the 2E DMG was a mere shadow of the 1E DMG, which is like a trove of meandering ideas and arcane tables, headings, words and art. The 1E DMG is a weird book even today - you can delve into it and become inspired even if the material isn't related to what you're doing.
Kits, kits, kits. Despite balance problems, I think that kits were the best rules-based offering for the game that 2E had to offer. A bard with the Blade kit was instantly a completely different kind of character. Although prestige classes are fine for NPCs, for PCs that is something that prestige classes can't emulate until the pre-reqs are met, and by then it's too late, IMO...
Campaign settings. Say what you like about 2E rules, but it easily had the best campaign settings around, from Birthright to Al Qadim to Planescape to Dark Sun, it's still king. 1E's offerings of the Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance and Greyhawk pushed less boundaries (although Dragonlance is an amazing feat to this day), but provided a foundation for the 2E settings to build on.
Modules. 1E was a pioneering game, and as such it experienced bursts of creativity in the module department, with adventures regularly adding to the monster repertoire of the game and uncovering new territory for the game (in particular the Desert of Desolation modules, Ravenloft, Dwellers of the Forbidden City and the "no-gear" dungeon in the Slavelords modules spring to mind, among multiple others). With TSR's realisation that it wasn't making much money from modules, I think these were gradually replaced by fluff-heavy supplements.
At least, that's my take...note that I haven't stuck to rules artifacts here, but almost concentrated on the wishy-washy stuff that people like to dismiss as irrelevant, because that's a lot of what's important about the game to me.
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