AD&D, looking backwards, and personal experiences

[Ridley's Cohort]

I think here AD&D's greatest perceived weaknesses is actually one of its strengths.

For the most part, AD&D's mechanics were often disassociated with one another...[stuff removed]

3e could do that, but it took much more work. You couldn't remove skills like you could NWPs without majorly re-writing classes. Likewise, feats were not removable unless you gutted the fighter. Changing XP gained changed magic item creation and treasure balance vs. EL. Deadlier crits screwed up CR. Replacing the 3e ability score table with Basic's slower progression would force you to re-write every single monster in the game. It was too unwieldy to change all the stuff due to interconnection.

That's not to say AD&D's rules were better in all places (the elegance of Fort/Ref/Will still puts AD&Ds Five Arbitrary Categories to shame) but they were a lot more modifiable.

I would agree that integration is not automatically a boon over compartmentalization, except in one respect: ease of learning. But let's put that detail aside, and get back to the thrust of your argument.

I do think you are implicitly applying two very different sets of standards.

Let me embrace your hypothetical, and let's follow through all the way. Suppose as a DM I decided I did not like the 3e Surprise rules and simply eliminated them altogether. Whack!

What happens? The are balance considerations, to be sure. In particular this presumably weakens the Rogue. How much? In very low levels, maybe a lot. But at higher levels a puissant Rogue is dependent of Full Iterative Attacks to do anything important. This might be as high as a 30% hit on offensive potency, or it could matter much less than that.

Let's put that aside for a moment, and don out 1e DM Hat. Here is a list of houserules that are consider so minor and common most people do not even recognize them as houserules:
1. Play only low level --> Huge boost to the relative power of demihumans over Humans.
2. Remove the weapon vs. AC table --> Huge boost to certain common weapons like Longsword vs. hammers & 2H weapons. (Oh, and elves love that, too)
3. Make higher stats more common --> Boosts everyone, but easy access to a higher Con is a tremendous boon to the survivability of Magic-Users, thereby weakening relative class balance.
4. Make really high stats more common --> Boosts dominance of Fighter in melee versus other classs, because 18/76 Str and 17 Con are very powerful versus what a Thief or Cleric can ever do, regardless of their good rolls.
5. Rationalize stats with something in the spirit of Point Buy --> Makes Paladins ridiculously weak, because the class is only somewhat close to balanced if the Cha is more or less "free" (a result of a lucky roll).
6. Remove dual-classing rules because they are so stupid --> Eliminates (theoretical) balancing mechanism between humans and demihumans
7. Add Specialization and Double-Specialization rules --> big boost to Fighters
8. Make magic items rare --> big negative to non-casting classes

All the above are houserules that are approximately as "big" as removing the Surprise rules completely from 3e.

What is the secret that allows 1e DMs to make such big changes? The secret is ...<drumroll>...Do not care.

That is it.

The bottom line is that AD&D is a coarser system than, say, 3e. Coarseness (or fineness) is neither intrinsically good nor bad. It is a style choice.

The idea that the compartmental rules style of AD&D adds stability is simply a myth. What add stability is a difference in expectations. It was simply not the norm for 1e DMs to worry all that much about everything being quite fair. It was the DMs job to make the adventures interesting. It was the players job to figure out how to have fun enough.

Do not care. It is really easy, if you put your mind to it. Let's you concentrate on the fun stuff you really like. And it works in all editions!