Some of the reasons I enjoy playing D&D are the Sacred Cows so many want to grind into hamburgers.
If I want roleplaying experiences without them, I play different games.
In the late 80's and early 90's, I too believed that a game would be better if it was more realistic, combat was not abstract, hit points were stupid, classes and levels were bad design, linear probability was inferior to normal distributions and all the rest of the things that all the cool people believed.
Then I started playing the systems that had implemented those ideas and discovered that there were big tradeoffs in practice, and that the solutions to my gaming problems so many people were adamantly insisting on didn't in fact do what they were supposed to do. Intuitive combat mechanics like active defenses, armor as damage reduction, and so forth ultimately didn't make combat more realistic or rewarding they just slowed the game down and made it fiddlier and fiddlier. Removing hit points only made combat swingier and more predictable and not more dramatic, and also made combats harder to balance. Removing classes and levels didn't make player characters more diverse, it actually did the opposite, while producing tons of chargen traps and balance issues because "solutions" like point buy were invariably unbalanced. Dice pools to create normal distributions of probabilities didn't create a superior play experience, they just made the game harder to GM by hiding actual chance of success from all parties in the play while making the game harder to design and balance because even the designer seemed to not understand how things like linear modifiers or altering the difficulty actually effected the chances of success.
In short, I went to those systems that had slaughtered D&D's 'Sacred Cows' and discovered that they weren't as smart as the designers believed they were and that in adopting those systems I went from one set of problems to another.
I also noticed in this period that if these alternative systems were so great, you'd think that they come to dominate the design of cRPGs as well. But cRPG designers largely stuck to what worked precisely because it worked.
So I went back to D&D when 3.5 came out and I stopped thinking that because I could see problems that meant I was a better designer than my elders or that the designers trumpeting how great their designs were really were much anything other than arrogant.
The more systems I get exposed to, the more impressed I am by D&D, BRP/Pendragon, Classic Traveller, and WEG D6. And if I were to throw another system in the mix as really seeming innovative to me, it would be the cRPG Fallout (especially Fallout 1 and Fallout 2).