IWD1 is particularly punishing because it is a dungeon crawler that starts your party at level 1 unless you export characters and start over. It's meant to be a hard slog of a game, a challenge. But it takes minutes to walk across Kuldahar, and it is a really badly designed map as well. Any single map in Athkatla of BG2 is a dream in comparison. I actually didn't have this problem in BG1 for some reason.
I think Tyranny had the nice balance I'm seeing here in BG3 as well.
5e and Tyranny's homegrown system are both are far less dependent on good gear compared to 2nd Edition or 3.5. So it is a lot easier for me to ignore all the garbage.
