3e has long been my favorite edition. While I have an extensive library for 2e, its rules can be a mess and there's a lot of problems and contradictions. I largely attribute the problems to a lack of central vision which 1e had with Gary, a lack of playtesting, too much emphasis on campaign settings which had their own unique rules, and an over reliance on freelancers who had different ideas of what was properly balanced. To use 2e, I'd need to do some extensive house ruling to get all that stuff to work together properly. 3e by contrast would require less house ruling on my part to work the way I want.
That's not to say it's a perfect edition. The biggest single problem for me is the 3.0/3.5 split. I've never been fond of 3.5; I've always viewed it as a cash grab. I didn't like how it wasn't just a collection of errata to fix 3.0's issues, but actually added more material to core and changed things that were fine enough which pretty much necessitated replacing the 3.0 books no matter what WotC said about it. It doesn't help that some of the worst broken and cheesy aspects of 3e were part of 3.5 either. Another big problem is the madness to which charoping can sink, but that at least can be mitigated somewhat by a DM with a firm hand.
Some people have aid 3e works better with a group of players coming from AD&D and applying its assumptions to 3e. That's probably my experience; I went into 3e after 6 years of 2e and ran it with with the sensibilities of AD&D. And I enjoyed DMing 3e more than 2e. At the very least 3e tends to be clear and concise while 2e is often maddeningly vague.
