My Game Complexity Moment of Inflection

I can point to a specific event in my gaming timeline where my ideas pivoted entirely. An "a-ha" moment, or I suppose an "oh-no" in this case.

AD&D 2e in college, late 90s. We were playing with the Skills & Power ruleset, which added a great deal of customization to AD&D. A new player familiar with Basic came in and wanted to try it out, so the DM took him aside and explained all the new rules: subabilities, skills, powers, specializations, etc. It became painful for me to watch because his eyes were visibly starting to glaze over. The DM just pressed on, excitedly explaining how far the game had come. New guy makes a character, plays for a bit, never comes back.

Now I had no trouble with Skills & Powers or the mindset at the time, but just seeing someone else bounce off of it really made me think. What was gained by splitting attributes into subabilities? All the different powers? I had just accepted it all. I kept playing in that group and had fun, but the seeds were planted. I no longer saw complexity and "crunch" for its own sake as a desirable thing.

And if that was not what I wanted, what was it about the game actually appealed to me?

Epilogue: later I learned the new guy was off doing an Empire of the Petal throne thing elsewhere, so I suppose he wasn't turned off of RPGs entirely. We were pretty condescending overall to someone who was probably gaming on entirely more sublime level than we were.

A Rant about Subabilities:

So for those of you who aren't ancient grognards, a Subability in Skills & Powers era AD&D meant each Attribute was further split into two separate subabilities. So you went from the standard 6 Attributes to a whopping 12.

 You could shift points around as long as the two subabilities were within four points of each other. The most egregious example was Strength, which was split into Muscle and Stamina. Muscle was your ability to clobber enemies (hit, damage) and Stamina was your ability to carry everyone's stuff around (encumbrance).

Take a wild guess which subability of Strength everyone cranked as high as they could. Go on...

For example, I had a 16 Strength Fighter at the time and I immediately bumped Muscle to 18 so I could roll percentile Strength and dropped the useless Stamina subability to 14. Everyone else did something similar with Strength, even the wizard players. 

So It was presented as a choice, but it really wasn't much of one in the end.