Note the BrOSR’s departures from the old guard:

Wesely’s Braunstein One: Each player has three goals. Players are scored based on whether they perform their goals.

Wesely’s players: “Okay, let’s just read our goals to each other and see if there is anything we can collaborate on.”

Jeffro and Budbs after reviewing 12 playtest reports on session Braunsteins: Braunsteins are better without assigned goals and without point scoring mechanisms. The key thing for producing great play is honestly… for the players to lean in to playing their roles. When the dust finally settles, nobody will be able to deny who the winner was.

Gygax’s: “As this book is the exclusive precinct of the DM, you must view any non-DM player possessing it as something less than worthy of honorable death.”

Gygax’s Players: “Derp derp… Gary didn’t use his own rulez! Lolzololzo”

Jeffro: This game is too big for me to master on my own. I need all of the players to be familiar with the rules so that they can help me run the game.

The BrOSR: Here are a dozen ways to remove the referee from the position of being the bottleneck on campaign activity. Here is the best way to distribute the load he bears across every player in the campaign so that scaling becomes possible.

The old guard did not isolate what made these games work. They did not identify what was holding campaigns back. When Gygax attempted to make a giant leap of refinement in the medium… they turned on him because of his attempt to walk back rule zero type thinking.

The old guard was committed to chaos and disorder from the very beginning. About the only reason they speak up at all is to take credit for creating the nongame that D&D quickly became during the eighties. But they don’t even deserve credit for that.

People that had no idea what in the heck the early D&D pamphlets were talking about were quite up to the task of inventing that without any help from anyone in Wisconsin or the Twin Cities.