imo they aimed to evoke the 1E “feel” for nostalgia,
while actually riding on a 3E nostalgia wave
but with compar. simple rules, that ease people into the game
“1st Edition feel 5th Edition rules” was the slogan
the “balanced edition” was 4E … and they wanted to go away from that
Grumble grumble google google … hang on … here we go:
Mearls called this one of two basic philosophies for the game (the other being to make life easier for the DM).
yeah that’s like saying “it should have dice”
one of the main criticisms of 3E-fans for the 4E was that “everything felt the same”
(not true imo)
but yeah sure … they did not purposefully try to make an “unbalanced edition”, but the comparability of the classes, you had in 4E, was gone
Dude. You’re just arguing for the sake of arguing now.
It’s literally one of Mearls’s two design philosophies. And it’s not at all like saying ‘it should have dice.’ Some games have no expectation of balance. Older D&D had no kind of balance.
Getting back to the original topic, I’m not sure balance is the culprit, or at least not exclusively. Balance + system mastery is still going to leave a lot of room for powergaming.
A point here is that not all the stuff that is published in the WotC books is as balanced as we might like it to be - and it only becomes apparent after it hits the table and we get our grubby paws on it.
Banning certain things is a way to amend the rules in the lightest touch way. If the system is generally fine except for one build then banning that build and keeping everything else fixes your problem. Building a new system ground up to avoid that specific problem does not seem like a good use of anyones time.
Darthbink’s Edition War post (with a 
):
typical character for the editon (with a ):
also they never balanced anything after level 10 and used “rule of cool”
No need to. There’s so much stuff out there already. If you don’t like min-maxing, there are plenty of games where you can’t.
But yeah, otherwise agreed.
Can’t expect me to bite when you leave out the best one!
Indeed, without 3.5e, are we really discussing D&D?
As a newbie, I heard that 3.5 is everybodies beloved 
thinking that is also why I’ve heard good things bout pathfinder 
btw glad to see my simple post turned into such a lively discussion, gotta do this more often, really interesting to see all these perspectives.
Also the repeat of communicate reminds of the first few YT vids I watched bout DnD where a DM said that over and over as well
2E → 3E was quite a shift … 3E → 4E was quite a shift too
TL;DR = the difference was, that back when 3E came out, people were less raging online (and more tallking within their gaming groups) and thus were less likely to find likeminded people to spam online
I know what you mean - the whole thing’s a famously disorganized stream of consciousness (although … does it really need to be organized?), but there are a couple editorial decisions in there that I respect the heck out of.
Then again, all these online edition wars are nothing compared to the fan wars of the 30s. 