The question was why do you like the Old School.
I've been gaming since '80. I'm Old School, I wasn't expelled that I'm aware of.
I gave my reasons why I liked going back and playing an old game.
I'm being called out for it. I don't begrudge anyone their reasons, and haven't said a word in that regard (I /could/ a lot of nonsense gets tossed around when people get defensive, but that doesn't strike me as the point of the thread, which sounded, to me, like it would be positive).
I've just been defending my hard-won (by not dying - and that wasn't always easy) right to some nostalgia.
In particular, if we want some subtle distinctions, that brand of nostalgia you get when you have the chance to go back and re-capture something you didn't get to do nearly /enough/ of back in the day. Which is why my favorite things to paleo-game aren't 1e, even though I still love it, warts & all, or Champions!, which I played & ran a /lot/ in the 80s, but the games I was interested in but didn't get to play as much as I'd like, like RQII and Gamma World. Also probably why I'd rather dust off the actual game, than go auditioning retro-clones.
I was playing D&D back in the '80s. I started with the Red Box (Mentzer version) then moved on to AD&D with my friends. The thing was, I was 10 when I started (and yes, we did play in my best friend's basement and yes, I did bicycle home afterwards... no demogorgons though... lol).
The interesting thing is that I have come to revisit the old games from that era and now, as an adult I am running these games. It has been kind of a revelation as I realized that as a kid I probably wasn't playing the same game as I'm playing now. We glossed over a lot of things back then that on reading now I understand a whole lot better.
One example is that, as a kid, I didn't understand the whole weapon bonus vs AC thing (mainly because then I didn't understand that AC was an actual fixed value that represents a specific combination of armor and shield). We probably didn't use a whole lot of other stuff from AD&D as well (we probably more played Basic with AD&D classes).
It was a retro-clone that actually pointed me back to the OSR games. I then started digging back into the older editions and started finding that after reading the rules as they were written, I found that I actually liked what I read.
My rediscovery of old school gaming has revitalized my D&D gaming, as an adult.
Although I mainly stick to the retro-clones for the actual rules, I use my copy of B/X for dungeon design and reference... for all intents and purposes I play B/X but with ascending AC and to hit bonuses.