Lyxen
Great Old One
But if you do believe there is still room for improvement and growth, then please respect that critique is never pointless
I don't accept this sentence, and I don't respect critique that is not constructive and sounds like a complaint. What I accept is constructive criticism, which is not the same thing as critique.
that feedback is a necessary part of that cycle, and just because we can't see a better path, does not stop our desires for one.
And once more, as many people are telling you, what might be a "better" path for you might not be better for everyone else. So please accept that your wishes might just be your own, and that complaint is just pointless, all the more when it has been demonstrated to you that your wishes go against the very design intent of 5e.
Now was the CR system in 3e perfect? Hell no. But it was just as simple as 5e's system if not more so, I ran many campaigns in 3e and 3.5.....
3e's system was designed in accordance with 3e overall design, which was that of a competitive game with many options. As a result, the reason the EL computation could be "simple" (honestly, it was not more simple than that of 5e), was because it relied on a huge core of other rules about monster design. These rules were extremely bulky, extremely constraining and, in the end, exactly as chancy as those of 5e. One simple example was that, in 3e, buffs had a huge influence, and an encounter could go totally one way if one side was allowed to buff and not the other, and the other way around.
So not only was it not better (I ran and played huge campaigns under 3e as well), but it required extremely complex rules which caused me to spend 3 hours designing a single high level monster, but with no more chance of getting an encounter right than under 5e.
and never had this problem. Did I have to make some tweaks to account for a specific party, sure, of course, as any good DM must.
Then I don't see how that could cause you a problem in 5e.
But they were tweaks, I didn't toss the core math out the window and basically double the difficulty of every encounter just to get some challenge for my players (and 3e had WAY WAY WAY more options than 5e does). The fact that I am constantly having to do that for 5e tells me that something is off there. That is the table experience that I have generated.
And this is because you are not using 5e in the spirit in which it is intended. 5e is designed for standard characters with no options, whereas 3e was built with already partly optimised characters in mind. 3e was a geek game, 5e is a casual game.
Please accept that, if you are running optimised characters using options and probably dice-rolled stats instead of a standard array, you need to up the difficulty by 2 grades or consider your adventurers at least 1-2 levels higher. Then the maths will work much better.
But as long as you continue using 5e and its tools as 3e, you will need adaptation.