I'm going to pick on you here because you gave me a really nice introduction to the topic, but this post is really a response to the entire thread.
First all, this conversation almost never is productive and I think I'll have to drop it because invariably this topic creates a lot of defensiveness about whether or not they are a good DM, or whether they had good DMs, or what it means to be good DMing and I'm really not interested in those topics and least of all when discussed from a defensive standpoint.
Then why bring it up in the first place?
But that said it is so incredibly obvious from this claim that I'm not communicating well and you have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about.
Because absolutely, I6 Ravenloft (my favorite adventure of all time) is just a simple dungeon crawl. Indeed, it's a simpler dungeon crawl than a lot of the things that are on offering up that point. The great thing about say I6 or Hickman's other masterpiece 'Pyramid' is that Hickman takes the tools that 1e AD&D provided and he doesn't demand anything of the system other than what it already provides for and supports. I6 Ravenloft is a pure dungeon crawl of check for traps, kick down the doors, kill the monsters, and take their stuff in its purest form. But what he does is make that pure dungeon crawling experience powerfully evocative and literary by the use of a great framing story, by the use of a proactive antagonist, and by the use of great atmospherics including probably the best designed map in the history of gaming. But there is nothing going on in the game other than dungeon crawl and one of the ways you can tell that is that Hickman has to create relatively few inline rulings or minigames to describe the encounters that he designed.
I'm going to ignore your first sentence here because like your previous paragraph, I don't think it's productive.
I picked Ravenloft because we were talking about "killing monsters and taking their stuff" and I highlighted the sentence in your post that I had in mind when I picked it -- the scenario is one where the plotline and character and backstory around the adventure is important enough that there's more to it than simply killing monsters (although there is plenty of that). I could have picked Village of Hommlet or Dragonlance I suppose as they have other plot and information gathering elements besides simply killing everything in the dungeoncrawl. Dragonlance even aspires to character development along the way, though a lot of folks didn't like the sweeping narrative ("railorad-y") arc. When I talked about primordial, I meant the earliest dungeons (B2) where basically clearing out the monsters is the goal.
I6 Ravenloft is not a module that shows off 1e AD&D's limits as a game. Quite the contrary, it's a module that shows off the game's strengths. If you want to show off the weaknesses of the system you are much better off picking another even older dungeon crawl and that's S2 White Plume Mountain. This is a "dungeon crawl" that is anything but a classic kick down the doors dungeon crawl and instead envisions the entire dungeon as a series of custom minigames where the rules of the game are encoded into each encounter area. Read the text of S2 and then imagine you're a brand manager or design manager for the game tasked with reviewing a writer's submissions and making sure that he is adhering to the game rules and making sure that single set of rules are utilized by all the various writers, designers, and contractors you've hired. It's really clear that there is absolutely no concept of that in publishing S2 and also that the designers of the dungeons are getting more creative than the rules allow. Sure, there is less story and literary value here than in I6, but I6 sticks within what the game knows how to cover. S2 however immediately creates the problem that 1e AD&D's lack of a unified skill system means that how a particular challenge is handled by the game is all over the place, not only across the brand but sometimes even within the same product.
Now, S2 is what I would also call a classic funhouse dungeon, and If we're talking "killing monsters and taking their stuff" this is a classic example of that. Plotline? Character? Essentially zero.
Right, so the scenarios started running into situations that the rulebooks didn't cover, and so they handled this by writing adventure-specific effects. In this particular scenario, most of the spot rules were about the particular traps -- pretty common in the day. I doubt you could come with a "unified trap system" for any of these custom funhouse rooms.
I played back then as well and we had blast and for the first few years this was all so novel that I didn't even realize we were having problems or what they were and I sure as heck didn't have a clue what the solutions were. But as for the claim this isn't rocket science, go look at the text of the flooding room trap in C1 and evaluate it as a set of skill rules for swimming with the intention of using it as the basis of general rules for swimming/drowning/rescuing people ect. Imagine the rules used for PC's as lifeguards on the beach or something if you think it wasn't rocket science to shift game focus.
Right, so what I was saying earlier applies here. My statement about "rocket science" referred to players coming up with house rules for these sorts of things, or as in this scenario, written, adventure-specific rulings. We didn't worry or care at the time about whether those were the best rules possible or whether they would be used in all instances. I actually don't even worry much about them today. At the time, there was a Dragon article about using your character stats for dealing with "skill tests" (e.g. roll under your INT to make a "Knowledge check" to get more info about something you observe. Roll under your DEX to jump across the roofs of two buildings). When I say it isn't rocket science, I mean we happily grabbed those approaches (or made our own) and didn't worry too much about whether they were official rulings -- we did what we needed to do to get by, and that was fine. Now, newer systems have nice systems for stuff like this, and we use those. Shrug? In any case, these house rulings weren't "rocket science."
Because like I said, the fact that you evaluate I6 as something other than a simple dungeon crawl is hugely revealing that this problem never even struck you back in the day and you really never had a lot of soul searching about it. I'm not saying that to attack your DMing, because I sure as heck am not defending all my DMing back before age 23 or so or even heck to this very day (I still learn and make mistakes). But we are really really on different pages.
Again, this isn't productive.