Like most people in the OSR community, I had initially held a dim view of the 2e DMG, especially compared to its predecessor, the 1e DMG, which contains a wealth of content for running a game, building a campaign world, and advice for DMs. The 2e DMG, by contrast, seemed only to contain rules that should have been in the PHB in the first place. And yet, when actually running a session of AD&D 2nd edition, I found that DMG to be a joy to play with as it was easy to reference, logically organized, and most importantly, contained only those rules that I would need to run a game, and nothing more; No long winded passages with the actual rule buried deeply within, no questionable admonitions on how best to punish players, and no extraneous, untested rules best left as magazine articles. Sadly, no tables of random harlots either, so it’s not all perfect. For running the game at the table, I found the 2e DMG to be much more useful than its 1e counterpart, and deserving of a lot more credit than I had initially given it.
