Trickster Spirit
Explorer
Well of course it isn't ALWAYS true but I'm guessing that it is USUALLY true, by simple logic. Let's say that the majority of players start sometime in the age 10-15 range. Some older (like yourself - presumably in your late teens?), some younger. Depending upon which games were extant at the time one started, one is likely to start with that game.
I was first exposed to D&D when I was 7 or 8, but didn't get really into it until a year or two later. This was the early 80s, when the main versions in publication were AD&D and the B/X boxes. I was gifted four hardcover AD&D books, so that was where I started. I didn't even know about OD&D until the internet era. Now maybe if I started in my early 20s, in the mid-90s, I might have started with 2E - but again, we tend to start with what's popular at the time.
I'm not arguing against you necessarily, but I'd question your initial assumption here - do the majority of new players start sometime in the age 10-15 range?
It's an interesting question to me - Mearls mentioned at one point Wizards had data saying the average D&D player was college aged, which implies the playerbase skews more towards kids / teens than older gamers, but they also explicitly designed the 5E experience table to have campaigns fit the college academic year. That implies to me that there actually are a lot of college age players, rather than just being the result of averaging groups above and below them.
So are most of those players picking up the game from a younger age and just finding groups in college, or do colleges serve as a propagation vehicle for generating new D&D players?
I.e., what percentage of middle-school / high-school players form new groups when they get to college, and do the 4-6 new college age players they each introduce to the game outnumber the amount of middle-school / high-school players picking up the game in the first place?