Mention that forgotten game of you whistlist that never go on sale

I never had trouble with the AD&d rules, because their only real problems were manifested in the board adnd game to be frank, and as DMs we always strived to fix these with our own custom rules, custom changes, custom improvements.

Of course you can tweak any pen & paper RPG. Personally I prefer systems that are more intuitive though.

In pc games on the other hand, they never mattered that much as you say, especially for those of us that did play the board game in the 90s and 00s and knew these already.

It does matter for first time players. It's very easy to fall into beginners traps if you're not familiar with AD&D.

. Saving throws always seemed natural, unlucky rolls were always part of the game. A wizard weak in low levels, and powerful in high levels was always normal for me, and I loved it as it was.

Saving throws always seemed natural, unlucky rolls were always part of the game.

Saving throws is one thing, having a character vulnerable to something is not a bad thing. What I'm opposed to is the "one unlucky roll->You're dead". That is just putting the need to reload into a single dice roll. There's a reason why pen & paper RPGs have moved away from such things to a large extent these days. I'll address the issue of wizards as well. Having them super weak early on and super powerful later on resulted in some rather boring play-sessions when one player would feel useless. That's why TSR introduced band-aid fixes, rather than doing something about the root of the problem, the fact that one class was so powerful that it broke the game, they just said "against these things, wizards can do nothing".

However, in the end none of that stuff mattered man, all of those things were just means to an end. What made torment and bg2 great unforgettable games were completely different things (that maybe escaped you? I don't know).

Why do you feel the need to have such a condescending tone? Just because I don't fully agree with you does not mean that it escaped me.

It had to do with immersion, with atmosphere, with great dialogue and choices, with characterization and memorable npc personalities including an amazing villain which is essential to make a good game of this genre, with "goals" in-game, and certainly with epic-ness and challenging stuff such as epic hard fights with enemy parties/dragons/liches. I wonder if you ever fought the demon prince in Throne of Bhaal ? A hell of a fight. Still, in order to replay such a game many times which I did, I had to resort to mods once again, and especially remember the hardcore Tactics Mod. :) In any case, graphics do not make a game necessarily great or bad. There's much more important stuff in rpgs and all of us rpg fans know that fact pretty well.

I play games by Spiderweb, so I'm well aware of the fact that graphics does not make the game. Does not mean that I don't like some eye candy, but it's far from the most important bit.
In terms of dialogue choices, Pillars has more substantial ones than BG2. Torment still beats Pillars in this regard, but Pillars does the whole "Dialogue as gameplay" bit better than BG2. Same with the consequences of your actions, they're more far reaching in Pillars than they were in BG2.

And I do know it for a fact from dependable sources that Pillars is way too easy as an rpg as of now. Same as wasteland 2. Their biggest problems. It's more than enough for me at least for now, to stay away from Pillars. I may be playing it after some years of course, but only with the proper difficulty mods from the community. xD

But BG 1 & 2 (and Icewind Dale for that matter) are pushovers in terms of difficulty if you know the system. The AD&D system is filled with beginners traps that can make it a lot harder for a first time player, but if you know your way around the AD&D system, they're really easy. Pillars has a far more balanced difficulty, as you don't end up with characters that are as super-powered as some of the late-game characters will be in BG2 in particular. So yes, to a first time player BG 2 will be a harder game than Pillars, but not to someone who knows the rules and a bit about character optimization.

It's hard to say what would fix the D:OS difficulty, as it had so much to do with level, gear and the class you play... it definitely needed some balancing done. If you were under-geared and under-leveled, some of the fights could be impossible. On the other hand with decent gear and being 1 level over, the fights would be a breeze. I prefer it to be more casual myself, but being too easy does bother me a bit. Have you tried the enhanced version? I'm not sure they did anything with the difficulty or not. I know a lot of people complained about the difficulty, but I think a lot of people complained about the story towards the end as well. It seemed more developed from the start and kind of got worse as you went on.

As far as your fantasy question goes, I think as long as the combat is fun and the game is decent/well written, I would not have any problem with it. I can't say exactly what would turn me off about certain games, I tend to change "moods" as to what I want to play at times. Sometimes I am up for FPS or RTS, but since I started playing RPGs I have really enjoyed them... but still do not always feel like playing them. It has been a while since I played a good RTS though. I played the first installment of Starcaft II and it was enjoyable, but I wanted to wait for the protoss to be released, as it was always my class of choice before :P But now that it's out, I will probably wait for it to go on sale to buy it. There are also some other RTS I have been looking at that I might try instead.