alt Hacker NewsHouse rules are part of the appeal of the game. RPGs are supposed to be something that you make your own, to whatever degree you want. D&D did have some really incoherent rules that accreted over time though... I grew up with AD&D (the gold book), and I don't think anyone ever used all the rules from that.
Right, but there's a difference between choosing not to use some subsets of the rules and just not understanding that they're supposed to be there in the first place. The ones that stand out the most to me are what I'd bin as administrivia, such as maintenance of kingdoms and such. But as a more pertinent example, I don't recall even once playing a session where things like distances and location were tracked during combat. It was always done in the theater of the mind.