And here's been the point of a lot of other people:
The rules can only explicitly cover a subset of things that can occur in the course of a D&D campaign. Your players can and will come up with more. By providing more rules structure to adjudicate broad situations, the rules in 3e are more defined, less inconsistent, and less free-wheeling than 1e which didn't have the broader structure.
But 3E doesn't really have "more rules" does it? I mean, practically everything possible revolves around a single rule: D20 vs DC. This is a rule created, precisely to provide more "free-wheeled" adventures.
In 1E, there was a specific rule for each situation that Gygax put in the book, but not for every situation outside of the rulebook that could be come up by players. The DM could choose to make things up OUTSIDE THE RULE SYSTEM or say "no".
That's why I say that 1E's rules were more strict. They told you what you could and could not do. In 3E, the D20 was designed for flexibility for "broad situations" (your words).