Dungeons & Dragons has become an oral tradition RPG and I will not be taking questions at this time.

D&D is lauded as being "the starter RPG" or a game everyone has to play in order to understand other RPGs. Many people consider it to be "accessible" and use their experience learning the game to anticipate what learning a new game will be like (lots of time/effort to learn).

But D&D is also a game that's most often taught directly by the DM you play with or indirectly by watching an Actual Play show. In my experience, far fewer people learn the game by reading the PHB cover-to-cover than by having it explained to them by their gaming groups.

D&D is also so intrinsic to the tabletop RPG zeitgeist that house rules are passed off as actual rules, such as critical failures (I wrote about the history of crits here: https://twitter.com/LuchaLibris/status/1245063353950703617). These rules get passed down from table to table until they're considered "canon."

The rules of D&D themselves are the subject of constant discussion because there are so many of them and a play culture has grown around breaking or "beating" the game by interpreting rules more or less literally (see: the "peasant railgun" meme and "broken" character builds).

And because D&D's rules are constantly evolving and growing, and because there are so many of them, a whole position at WOTC was created. The Sage and the Sage Advice column of Dragon Magazine act as official clarifications and rulings on the game like a kind of D&D Pope.

D&D is arguably MORE complicated because of the variety of ways in which the game was internalized and taught to others. This also means certain assumptions about the game are more prevalent because they've been passed down the most, i.e. DM as adversary or omniscient god.

What I mean by "D&D is an oral tradition game" is that BECAUSE it's so embedded in the collective unconscious, we all know about it, we know many of its core concepts, and we could probably play and teach others what we think is D&D without the need for a rulebook, at any moment.

I think if you're playing D&D as you learned it by watching a popular AP, that's fine! But acknowledge that you're running a fine-tuned machine without all its gears; you'll find stumbling blocks. Other games with fewer rules might give you the experience you want out of the box.