In any case, Dungeon Crawl Classics[1] is like a mainlining RPG nostalgia. It's the one product that put me in the back of the bus with my 4th grade buddies working their way through the Caves of Chaos. The art, rules and just general vibe are so Old School metal, you can practically hear Zeppelin playing in the background.

Magic is uncertain and rare, and death in DCC is the natural result of real danger. Encounters are not gradually scaled to fit the current Challenge Rating of the party. Can't say enough about how much fun this game is. Great community too.

[1] https://goodman-games.com/dungeon-crawl-classics-rpg/

IMO 5e isn't engaging in the right ways -- characters, and combat, become the primary context everything revolves around, and the dungeon itself falls to the wayside. Both because it's fairly easy, and encourages the DM to not kill you (even subtly, like the absurdly time-consuming character generation), so there's little reason to see the dungeon itself as a threat, and a tool. Skills get so minutely defined that even if you have a novel strategy, your character background strongly defines whether you can execute it (to the point that it's much easier to fall into standard patterns, and the dungeon is so nonthreatening that you can continue to do so indefinitely).

There's simply too little freedom and leeway in how you approach things, defining so many rules and contexts its not worth the trouble to continuously do novel things, but at the same time so expansive that it takes ages to get anything done. And the rules largely slow down the most uninteresting parts of the game -- standard combat, basic activities (leaping caverns and such), standard communication with NPCs, etc.

I mean its slow. The ruleset is fundamentally and ridiculously slow.

Pick a target background, race, and class, and race, spend a few seconds rolling or assigning stats, pick a handful of options from your race, class, and background, and maybe buy a little custom gear (though the default for class and background often has you covered).

5e chargen is usually lightning fast, even with a non-first-level start, unless you are creating your character by doing something like original optimized level 20 theorycraft. Which is probably a waste of time, even if you are dedicated to min/maxing, because someone's probably done the theorycraft you want online and you can just look it up.

The DM my group plays with has no issue killing off PCs, we're level 4 and have had 3 deaths across our party of 4 so far. (Two for the same player!).

DCC, which I've been playing and running for a while, is lethal in comparison. Which is a mark against it for many people, but my group loves it. We don't have a death a week, but we had several deaths over the past year. The threat changes the play style versus what we saw with 5e where it just felt like PCs couldn't die unless the DM went out of their way to create an excessive challenge that bordered on a forced TPK scenario.

You might just be too good at the game for usually appropriate encounters. My group's having a blast, and we've come to rely on all that healing to push our luck: jumping into more dangerous encounters, building our characters more for story and less for optimization, being able to play even when two of the five can't make it (usually the healer). If imagine newer players also need that healing, even when they're trying their hardest.

That's not to say you're wrong for not liking 5e. If it's too easy for you, then it's too easy. You could try to account for that by using tougher or more monsters, but that makes balancing encounters harder for the DM.

That's not to say the current situation is bad but it definitely sounds very different

Well, compared to the “classic” versions (through, oh, AD&D/2e), 5e’s handling of cantrips and assignment of hit dice to classes make the primary casters more active and less like eggshells at low levels, and healing outside of “healer” character abilities is much more generous by default (but there is also, in the books, a simple option that makes it grittier reverses all of that except the not-eggshells parts, by increasing the time for “short rests” and “long rests” which are key for both healing and spell recovery.) Also, I feel like lots of tables by people who come from older versions underuse exhaustion.

But this is one of the great things of this hobby:

1. There are thousands of systems to select from.

2. No one forces you to play it RAW.

3. If you do want RAW, you can probably find a system that works for you.

The most important parts are: what's fun and conveys the sense you want for the game; agreeing on the rules (either RAW or house) with some consistency (What do you mean I can't jump down 10'? You let him jump off a 50' cliff without getting hurt just last week!).

https://olddungeonmaster.com/2014/08/30/bounded-accuracy/

The TL;DR is that AC/attack bonuses/saving throws/save DCs used to scale a lot more than they do now. The upshot of this change as a DM is that you can plan out encounters differently. Feel like your first-level characters aren't getting enough of a workout? Throw a CR 3 or 4 encounter at them. I ran Curse of Strahd as my very first 5th Edition campaign, and there was an encounter at the end of the early section where I'm like, they already lost one character earlier in the dungeon, this is a straight-up TPK. But they handled it fine, although they used about a day's worth of abilities/spells that recharge with a long rest in a single encounter. That's where I started to get a much better feel for how encounter balance works in 5e.

I felt the same way about 4e: overpowered early on, but underpowered (compared to earlier editions) at higher levels. It basically felt like playing a party of 30th-level characters wasn't all that different from playing a party of 1st-level characters.

I think that's it: the stakes are too low. You don't have to ration your spells, there are few constraints, and your investment in your character is so great it's customer abuse to write them out of the story. Which is not say I don't get attached to my DCC guys.

This is the biggest issue I've run into with some individuals/groups, and one thing DCC really helped with (for them). Character creation in DCC take about 5 minutes, if that. 6x3d6, assign to stats in order, roll on a few more tables, spend your starting coin, ok let's go. It got several people over their hatred/fear of PC death even in our non-DCC games. I'm starting up a Call of Cthulhu game (which is very rough on PC health, both physical and mental) and there's more effort needed to create characters and much more invested in each character, but now that their fear is gone the game should be more enjoyable. Even with the possibility of characters disappearing in the night or losing their minds and becoming useless.

The later editions have much more general audiences from much different generations than those early ones, and so the game changes - and that's not a bad thing. Buuuut, combine that with the impetus of a corporation to make their product sanitary and palatable to that wide range of tastes, you end up with something bland and inoffensive.

edit: none of that is to say that I think 5ed is a bad game, it's not, it's just different in kind and in philosophy to the earlier editions.