Its certainly a nice choice for the casual gamer. You can just have an adventure, and not worry about planning your character 20 levels in advance in fear of being gimped or left behind by the resident powergamer. My first group lasted from around 1985-2001, and I can't even begin to recall the countless hours we played. The random dungeon generation stuff in the DMs guide combined with random encounters made it easy to just pick up the books and go. Certainly, there was that one player who would like to point out the flaws in everything, but then we got rid of him and the game worked just fine.