Our d&d experience is fundamentally different. Raise dead isn't bringing back Ellistraee, Kiransaelee, Helm, and all the other dead gods that are randomly back.
To be fair, gods being prone to come back troubles me far less than mortals coming back. Gods just have so many contingencies, they try to preserve many shards of their power and sentience to eventually ensure their return, they live in some form as long as they have followers, and so on. It's just really hard to kill them.
Helm, for example, had a shard of his power hiding in a goat. Eilistraee could have very well survived, albeit weakened, because she had followers were still loyal to her, and she was assumed gone just because her chosen was killed while the goddess herself had put a great part of her power in that mortal (and we know that deities more powerful than demigods can't fully appear on the prime, they do so through avatars, and that they can't be killed except on their home plane. That was a loophole that the writer intentionally created to allow Eilistraee to come back. Also, this is Ed Greenwood's version of the events, for example:
http://forum.candlekeep.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=19841&whichpage=22#476639). As for Kiaransalee, can High Magic, performed by someone who essentially was a novice, really wipe a deity's name from a world? If so, why didn't the elves do that with Lolth and their other enemies?
Besides, WotC randomly removed gods in first place, basing that choice not on story reasons, but on "there are too many gods, so lets just remove some", and "Drizzt is not special enough" for the drow pantheon (and I'm not kidding:
http://forum.candlekeep.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=19597 they even made sure to totally warp Eilistraee's character and goal to something that has absolutely nothing to do with her for that. Although they have now essentially retconned all of that).
This can be extended to characters that had to die and be left in the dust, not because it came naturally from their story, but WotC wanted their 100 yrs jump and Drizzt to feel even more gloomy (although, I must say, Bruenor's death wasn't that bad).
The Sundering being just "Ao fixes thing and people and gods come back" sucks, but it is no worse than "everything randomly blows up and continents appear out of nowhere" Spellplague. It would be definitely better if they put some effort into coming up with a decent explanation.
