"As much as I like 3E, when thinking back to 1st or 2nd edition AD&D, I have to admit that I miss _____________."
I missed official materials willing to fully throw balance to the wind if it was fun for the setting. Dark Sun had hideously broken things left and right, but it was fun. Some of my favorite 2e books were the "green books", the Historic Reference series for playing D&D campaigns in a lot of different historic eras with notes on how to make them historic (typically being no magic outside of artifacts and the very rare NPC caster, usually a divine caster) to a fantasy world based strongly on a historic era, which monsters were thematic, ways to change the currency around, the society of the era, plot hooks, ect. So what if Cure Light Wounds was as rare in one of those games as Wish was in a typical D&D game, it was fun and we didn't care if it wasn't "balanced" or not.
I miss books that were all about the fluff. Aurora's Whole Realms Catalogue. That little book was a treasure trove of neat stuff, devoting page upon page to the minutiae of shopping in the Realms: including an entire chapter on the various cheeses that are sold in Faerun, with typefaces and paper and printing to look like a 19th century Sears Catalogue except for a D&D world. A some items had small-print footnotes of game mechanics of how they could be used as improvised weapons or how they aided some skill or another, but it was pretty much just nifty fluff.
I miss Psionics having a "wow!" factor of being something really alien and different. Now, I think it went too far with 2e, like Telepathic powers not having saving throws, ignoring Magic Resistance, and being pretty much unstoppable unless you were also Psionic, not to mention how characters could learn to Teleport at 1st level, or throw a Disintegrate effect by 3rd level, but I missed powers having a completely different scale than the 0 to 9 of magic with Devotions, Sciences and High Sciences, and having truly weird things you could do that didn't look anything like magic. PsiHB and XPH were more balanced, to be sure, but with things like Astral Constructs that were just psionic clones of summoning spells it seemed like Magic with a point-based system added and some different fluff.
I miss Paladins being something special, something that stood out and wasn't just another booth at the Adventurer's Career Fair that was for people that wanted to be fighter-types but also had decent Charisma and Wisdom and "Lawful Good" stamped on their sheet.
I miss playing a Wizard (and sometimes a Cleric) being all about creativity. It seemed like back in my AD&D days playing a spellcaster was all about finding creative and innovative uses for the spells you had, and designing and researching new ones, and then finding new unintended uses for those spells too. I miss spells being a lot more open ended. I liked Command being any single-word command, as long as the course of action was crystal clear.
Level titles. They were sometimes fairly setting-specific, or at least specific to setting presumptions, but at least the rulebook saying that a 6th level Monk is a "Master" that an 8th level Cleric is a "Patriarch", or a 7th level Fighter is a "Champion" seemed to remind people that mid-to-high single digit levels was mighty compared to average folks and that you didn't need to be 15th or 20th level to be "high level" and stand out.
