AD&D 1E Edition Experience: Did/Do you Play 1E AD&D? How Was/Is It?

[Lanefan]

I'd say that sums it up nicely.
When you have the time and patience to do a deep dive into the books, the rationales for many rules become understandable and you can see how about 70% of the content holds together in a nicely balanced system, while 30% can be jettisoned or modified.

In the initial books up to and including MMII, yes; and the jettison-modification process is relatively straightforward. After that, however, in subsequent books (UA, OA, DSG, WSG, etc.) the signal-noise ratio gets much worse and the challenge becomes more one of finding and extracting the bits worth salvaging.