The problem with D&D isn't what you think it is...

...it's that Dungeons & Dragons isn't what you think it is.

Let me back up for a second and start by contradicting myself a little bit. D&D sucks. There are a lot of problems with D&D. I don't know that I'll ever play it again. But the vast majority of the complaints I hear about D&D are... wrong. The people making them are aware that they aren't enjoying the game (or at least not as much as they want to) but rather than identifying an underlying cause they just keep treating the symptoms.

The underlying cause is that you don't like D&D. You like TTRPGs; just not this one. And in your effort to enjoy it, you're playing it wrong. I know, there's no right way to play, GM trumps rules as written, etc. So sure, you can play it any way you want to. That's not unique to D&D or even TTRPGs. It's true of Monopoly. Free cash on free parking makes a terrible game worse but it's your right to play it that way if you like. It's true of Scrabble. Looking at a dictionary before you make your move is cheating, but that's how I play. That's how most people I know play. It's built in to the online versions because catching people cheating that way would be literally impossible so they had to alter the rules to fit. That's fine.

But a lot of people ask questions like why 80% (or whatever) of the rules are focused on combat when that's only about 30% of gameplay. What they've done there is identified a conflict between the game as it exists and the game they'd like to be playing. But instead of treating the cause (playing a different game) they just complain about the symptoms. For some people combat in D&D is the boring bit you try to get through as quickly as possible to get back to the "real game". But the way the game is designed is exactly opposite to this. Combat is the real game. The stuff you do in between combat is the flavour text. There are a few dice rolls here and there to add some interactivity, But the game, as written, is designed as a series of combat encounters with a little bit of story connecting them. So if you don't like the combat, you don't like D&D.

That's the core of about 90% of the complaints I hear. People who want to be playing a different game, but don't realise it. So instead you get all these people playing heavily modified D&D or using the D&D rules to play very different games. I've started playing some D&D games, looking forward to smashing some monsters, only to get extremely bored when the entire session goes by without a single fight. And yet, if I'd signed up to play a different system (eg. Fellowship or Blades in the Dark) then I wouldn't even have noticed the lack of combat.

The difference is, when I make a D&D character, all my choices are combat-focused. Almost every cool thing my character can do is a combat manoeuvre. Creating a D&D character is essentially answering one single question: what do you do in a fight? You can start a D&D game without knowing anything about your character's personality, backstory, motivations, etc. That stuff does not matter as long as you know what their role is in combat. Compare with something like World Wide Wrestling: you don't actually need to know what wrestling moves your character would use in a match, but you definitely need to know their character and personality (both within the ring and backstage).

So if your regular D&D game is "more about the roleplaying than the combat", or you've heavily house-ruled the game to make fights less tedious: there is a better option. Play a different game. D&D is a game about fighting monsters. If that's not what you want to be doing, you're playing the wrong game. If you think the problem with chess is that all the different rules for different pieces make it too complicated, maybe you should try checkers.

D&D isn't the only RPG. It's not the best RPG. It's certainly not a one-size-fits-all RPG or all things to all people. Stop trying to fit that square peg through that round hole and play a different game.