What? Seriously, what? How is that "favoritism"? I literally just described how old school D&D works in play.
I have heard like 6 different ways how old-school D&D is supposed to work. At times it's this brutal mistress that's supposed to be utterly cruel and unforgiving, and you have to have like 6 replacement characters in the wings and we LIKED it that way goshdarnit!. And at times its this way better powertrip then anything that came afterwards. Its better when it had less rules, and they where worse designed but thats a benefit because it taught people about game design.
I just have to take what everybody's claims are about it with a grain of salt.
Okay, I can understand that. I'll post more later, but the problem isn't in the descriptions. It's a conceptual gulf. You're looking at a lot of disparate pieces, but you're missing the framework in which they fit.
And right now, you're throwing around words like nostalgia, and ruined, and displaying anger at people who say positive things about a playstyle you've decided you disliked before you gave it a chance. You're prima facie dismissing the playstyle, not giving it a fair shake. And unless you overcome your preconceptions about how the game works, you're not going to be able to see how all the pieces go together into a coherent whole.
It helps to assume that the people who like the playstyle do so for valid reasons, not because they're horribly mistaken. I'm not saying to have blind faith in something you don't understand, just to keep an open mind. A lot of people have played this way for decades, and analyzed it extensively. By contrast, your exposure is fairly superficial. Your starting assumption should be there's probably something there, you're just missing it.
The thing is, the old school playstyle is
alien to most modern players. And by modern players, I'm not talking about 2020, or 2000... I'm also talking about 99.99% of the players who started in the 1980s. A lot of kids who picked up in the game in the 1980s were frustrated with D&D, for the same reasons you're frustrated today. The frustration comes from a clash of expectations.