What I liked most about Athas from its first incarnation is that it is essentially a planet at the end stage of the star going red giant. There was a golden age, several in fact, and it never will be as it was regardless at efforts of "re-greening." It is futile, the gods have left, the magic is tainted, the psionics will only increase, you are all fighting for what's left. Make meaning of the final ebb.
Ripping out the big magical movers and shakers, the Sorcerer Kings and the Dragon, is annoying, but easily replaceable. There'll always be another person with bad intent who wants a shot at the top. What is irritating is the attempt at "re-greening." That requires a GM willing to either put the kibosh on its expansion potential, or somehow corrupting it. Otherwise you slip into parasidaical parody, "good guys won, onward to utopia!"
There's a reason games about angels and demons repeatedly comment that heaven is not all that interesting a place for adventure. When it's heaven, there's little tension for the street level player; no tension, no adventure. If it's on the prime material plane at all, and has any sort of mixture of alignments, (let alone schools of thought), it has to by nature decay and corrupt into something interesting. Even a universe of LG is going to bicker about something to the point of conflict.