I never had a psionic character in 1e. I don't think anyone wanted to bother with the rules, and usually, what I heard from people who did have psionics was that it just meant a suite of psionic monsters like brain moles suddenly infested their games.
In 2e, I had limited experience with psionics. My DM loved them, and even had elite soldiers in an army who were all trained to use Death Field on the battlefield. Sure, there was always that one joker who claimed to have fairly rolled a page and a half of psionic wild talents, but my Dark Sun Gladiator only had the (terrible) Clairsentient Devotion of Combat Mind, lol.
For the most part, unless you wanted to play a specialist in a few powers, you needed some really high ability scores to reliably use your psionic powers in 2e*, and many powers people thought were busted, like Disintegrate, cost a ton of PsP's (40), had a difficult check (Wis -4), another Science and a Devotion as prerequisites, and finally allowed a straight up save vs. death magic to negate!
That didn't mean there weren't busted things you could do, however. As a thought experiment, I created a 1st level Psion with healing powers, did some back-of-the-napkin math on how many PsP's they could recover in a day, and discovered they could heal a truly ridiculous amount of hit points per diem- great if you're the kind of DM who wants players back in action ASAP, not so if time crunch is a serious factor in your campaigns.
EDIT: forgot the "*" comment I was going to make. It's interesting that I often see people claim that they want chances for magic to fail in D&D, including catastrophic failures- and here in 2e psionics we have exactly that- skill rolls required to cast "spells" and a chance for power to backfire or not work as intended.