Falling Icicle
Adventurer
3rd edition D&D fights against the notion that its easier to include material so others can remove it, rather than start with a simple base and add as desired.
Either approach leaves players feeling left out in the cold, but one is decidedly more newbie friendly, and the other more veteran friendly.
3e wasn't designed in a way that any of its components could be easily removed. Everything in the PHB was considered to be mandatory, remove at your own peril. DnDN is being designed with an entirely different philosophy. And even with every single option "turned on", Next is a much simpler game than 3e, even if you're just talking about its core 3 rulebooks.
Compare the skills, for example. 3e's skill ranks are far more complicated than Next's skills, which you either have or you don't, and a skill die that scales with level. In Next, you can try many things without having a skill at all. In 3e, there were not only "trained only" restrictions on many actions, but also, since you could have up to (level +3) ranks in a skill, and the DCs were set accordingly, it was often pointless to even bother trying if you didn't have max ranks in a skill, or close to it.