While I agree that AD&D made it more complex I don’t know that this was necessarily a bad thing. Admittedly I have almost no experience with early D&D. My friends and I, who started playing a few years later than you did, skipped right over D&D and went right for the advanced version. We saw it as a worthwhile tradeoff: there were more rules, but also more options.
And if there was one rule that our group adhered to it was that the rules should never get in the way of having a good time. For us they weren’t rules so much as suggestions.
