Quote Originally Posted by EggKookoo View Post
Another thing to keep in mind is that 3e is functionally a pro-player system, and was built that way in response to feedback gathered by WotC. It restricts the DM to being mostly a narrator and rule-Googler, and philosophically suggests the DM has no real power to affect the outcome of the game aside from making individual NPC decisions. Meanwhile 5e is very much a pro-DM system, with many rules and followup tweets and errata encouraging the DM to make sweeping creative decisions that affect the overall system. This is a fairly deep distinction that, I think, gets obscured by complaints about 5e being too simple.

People who like 3e often do so because it's a game that empowers the player over the DM through system mastery. It's the "peoples D&D" in many respects. 5e comes along and tells us system mastery isn't as important as what the DM wants to have happen. That has to stick in a lot of craws.
True. Though 5e was also build in response to feedback by WotC, and tried to tackles the few complains against 3e. (One of them being complexity of character creation at level 1, and the complexity of the game in general.)

But I feel that the main complain they tried to tackle was "I have toxic peoples on my table, could you make a system that does not push them to be even more toxic?", for example:
+ DM as a NPC-player can often degenerate as an "Adversarial DM". While a story-teller DM is supposed to be on the same side as players.
+ A lot of toxic players tend to ruin the fun once they reach a high enough level of system mastery. By making system mastery irrelevant, you reduce their influence on the table.
+ In 3.X, a new player can end up with a near-unplayable character (or at least very ineffective). And can remain locked in this situation if on top of that, the DM is kind of a jerk and is too rule-abiding to allow the player to change of character (without starting back from zero), or houserule a little. In 5e, making an unplayable character by mistake is near impossible, and the DM is much more encouraged to adapt the rules.