I'd be interested to know what you consider a typical adventure outline in Ravenloft. Not looking for a ton of details, just whether you think in terms of location or scene based adventures, the composition of mysteries vs. combat, how much socialization, that kind of thing. Basically, how you fill up the playtime. Because while you seem to be missing a fair amount of what I've been trying to say (that "what I'm looking for" in the quoted section above is another tickets to Munich moment), I do suspect you found a happy medium between D&D and the gothic elements that worked for you and your group. I was never a huge fan of I6 myself (admired some parts, not others), and while my exposure to the other published adventures was minimal, they didn't sound that good.
Agree that some of the mechanics in Ravenloft don't work particularly well. Many of the concepts are good, but the implementation is shaky. The DMs I know who used them well tended to ad hoc them a lot.
I think I was just confused what you were advocating. Apologies. Wasn't trying to be difficult. I thought you were saying that Ravenloft tried to be gothic horror, but failed in your mind, and you felt it could have better achieved it if it took a different direction, but it sounds like you are saying you can't do gothic horror in this kind of RPG so just embrace the D&D side of things.
That's a lot closer, though my position lacks the futility you're expressing. I'm just arguing that Ravenloft is D&D first, and the gothic horror elements are an overlay. If you come in with expectations set by other media, or even other RPGs (like CoC) with a different design and emphasis, you'll end up frustrated because you'll be missing many of the essential elements. But if you recognize it for what it is, and incorporate the gothic horror elements in ways that don't fight the mechanics and structure of the game, then you can have a fun D&D game with gothic horror flavoring.
But in terms of adventure structures I tended to run it monster of the week, with focus on monster hunts, mysteries, etc. That wasn't the only structure, but it was one of the reliable ways I found to prep. I stated this several times here, but just in case you didn't see those posts, I really started to connect the dots when I ran Feast of Goblyns and got the first Van Richten book (got that one like the day it came out). Feast of Goblyns had a section on 'major wandering encounters' which was basically about treating NPCs as alive in the setting, having their own agendas and moving around not being rooted to particular places (reacting to PCs, that sort of thing). The Van Richten books placed a lot of emphasis on monster hunts and customizing the monsters so they were almost like a puzzle to solve (so you might need to learn about their history if you want to find their weaknesses---and Ravenloft creatures could be pretty hard to kill if you didn't know their weaknesses). Usually when I prepped, I started with the villain and worked from there. In the case of the monster hunt, let's say a werewolf. It might be quite simple: the players are asked to help a village solve a number of local killings and that leads them down a trail of clues, and ultimately to the werewolf (and in that sort of scenario, often figuring out who the werewolf is might be important). This adventure might have zero encounters until the players are attacked by or confront the werewolf. But I could spice things up if needed (I tended to do so by tying those encounters to the werewolf through minions or another villain or bad guy involved in the adventure somehow). Ravenloft gives GMs a lot of flexibility for tailoring encounters, and encounters are meant to really be played up and just happen one after another like a slog (at least not in the early 90s Ravenloft) so I tended to abide by that and found it worked. If they were facing a powerful undead, like a lich, then certainly there would be more room for encounters with stuff like zombies and skeletons. But I'd say on average there was probably 1-2 combats per adventure for me. Sometimes there weren't even combats, they may just resolve the puzzle of the ghost by laying it rest, or they might flee from the villain and decide not to confront them. Filling up time never seemed to be a problem. And of course if the players traveled, all bets might be off, they could certainly have encounters along the road (but again I would not do it like I do in a sandbox campaign where I am rolling randomly and possibly having 0 possibly having 10 encounters depending on what happens with the rolls). I leaned heavily on the idea of the planned encounter in the boxed set. So one really atmospheric encounter where the players can interact with the emerging threat, hedge their bets, potentially make choices that result in a better or worse fight for them against a terrifying creature (rather than a bunch).
As an example I remember running a haunted house (Think it was the house of lament, which I elaborated on from the Darklords book--pretty sure that is the one it was in). There was basically only one real encounter running through the house when they were trapped in it (which was the adventure itself, trying to find a way to destroy the haunting or escape). I think I had a porcelain statue that was stalking the halls trying to kill them. So they explored and tried to evade that one creature. It has been ages so I don't recall too many of the specifics, but I do remember having this one looming threat that occasionally emerged.
I also eschewed things like magic items (Ravenloft was described as not having many in the black box) and shied away from dungeons: most of those kinds of locations in my campaigns were simpler, more practical, like a real world tomb where a lich might be residing. Experience was dolled out more slowly too. So the party had a pretty long period of low level adventures before getting to a point where they were tackling more powerful foes (and by then it was fun because I was able to throw thing like ancient vampires after them).
Now, if I understand your meaning with melodrama and personal horror. That stuff could still come up on the player end in my games. But I think I approached it in one of two ways: introducing it externally, or allowing it to emerge naturally and feeding it when it cropped up as a result of player choice. The former is a little more hamfisted. I would do it with greater caution these days. But I recall for example having a long time NPC who had been with the party for like two years, end up getting captured and turned into a flesh golem, then sent after the party. That had much more of a personal connection than say just having to deal with a flesh golem that was unrelated to the party in any way. Also powers checks and characters getting corrupted over time could lead to that, but as you said, that isn't something that came up reliably every adventure. The percentage chance for a powers check is actually pretty low (usually 1-2 percent, though it could go up to 10 percent for certain actions). But because it comes with a reward and punishment, there were always players who liked to test that rule and would go down the path (which in my experience worked pretty well in terms of capturing that slow transformation of a character). It might not fit perfectly to literary gothic for some folks, but I found it pretty cool to see in action and I became a lot more skilled in managing failed powers checks the more they came up. Overall though, I was content with this stuff being on the villain side of things.
Not sure if this answers your question well. I ran Ravenloft regularly from 91-92 to about 2003 (I became disenchanted with the d20 version of Ravenloft). So I did play a lot of different styles and approaches in that time. And I often ran the modules (which had problems, but I ran most more than once, and managed to play most of the ones I ran both as written and just cutting them up and using them as I needed: Feast of Goblyns was great for the latter).
Thanks, and it does give me some idea of your approach. Like I said, I think you're incorporating a lot of what I'm describing without realizing it, or without realizing how you've changed things from the gothic horror tradition, because you're describing a fairly standard D&D campaign with some gothic elements.
To make an aside, one of the things D&D has always been bad at is describing the basic premise of the game. Not the rules, but the way you use the rules to run a game. How you take the mechanics, and turn it into coherent adventures and campaigns. The consequences of the thin line between life and death, the importance of small unit tactics, marching order, weapon length, henchmen, hirelings, and so on. That's one of the reasons why the OSR first emerged, after all. There was an ur-playstyle, exemplified by the Greyhawk and Blackmoor campaigns, that was largely lost over the decades and needed be rediscovered. None of the old school D&D books did a good job describing it. People picked up bits and pieces, but except for those who were directly exposed to that playstyle, not a lot of people were able to pull it together in way that ran smoothly and as intended. The OSR spent a lot of time and blog posts chasing down and explaining that lost playstyle, which is exemplified in things like the Old School Primer or Philotomy's Musings.
One of the best examples of how to turn the rules into an adventure and a campaign comes from a monster-hunter game: the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG. It's very cinematic, and it's only tangentially gothic, and the formalized structure including Big Bads and the Monsters of the Week can feel a little rote, but it's not a bad reference because it shares a lot in common with D&D, and the genre is gothic-adjacent. Sounds like you adopted a similar structure. Villains as living (or not) and dynamic characters who take action based on their motives and the information available to them was less common in the early 90s, but it's just good campaign. So is interweaving recurring elements.
Ravenloft could use a better explanation of how to run a game. What I've been describing is a few general principles in that regard, but I haven't been getting into the details of campaign and adventure design. A good Ravenloft guide book would cover some of them, but place a lot more emphasis on specific details. The puzzles you describe is a good example; I've read the the same Van Richten books, and while they did emphasize customizing monster weaknesses (and strengths), they didn't do a very good job of explaining how to incorporate them into adventures, and primarily left it up to the DM. That's an area I think could be fleshed out. GURPS Mystery might be a good source. It's not directly about puzzles, but puzzles and mysteries are close kin, and it has a lot of advice on how to work it into a campaign. (Though to contrast it with BtVS, GURPS Mystery is a lot less formulaic).
Bringing it back to Ravenloft, there are a number of possible adventure structures. Location-based adventures can work, like the Castles Forlorn, but they require a lot more prep than a traditional dungeon crawl, because it's less about clearing the rooms and more about uncovering what's really going on. But fundamentally, I think a scene-based structure is probably the default. That works well with mystery/puzzle setups, and also with social maneuvering.
That drifted quite a bit, didn't it?