A few years ago I read through the rereleased 1st edition of the WEG Star Wars RPG, and was struck by how light and breezy it is. I'm currently running through the final edition of the same game, which pulls together the results of many years of development and expansion, and while it is the same game, and while many of the improvements are nice, as a whole the thing just falls flat.
I found exactly the same thing with Shadowrun, which had an excellent 1st edition, a 2nd edition that made several improvements but also added more 'stuff', then a 3rd edition that became massively complex, and then a 4th edition that changed the underlying ruleset and became, in my opinion, almost entirely unplayable (at least for a newcomer).
The upshot: bigger is not the same as better, and especially in the case of RPG rules it may well be the opposite.
Of course, that mostly restates one of my long-held beliefs: if you cannot present the core of your entire ruleset in a single 250ish-page hardback book, you're doing something wrong.
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