My experience of D&D is great – 3.5 is flexible, there are tons of prewritten alternative rules, also the DM can do much behind the scenes. I don’t play with generic groups – we are 4 friends and spend time having a lot of fun interpretating a character (and making obscene jokes and terrible puns all the way until laughter-induced apnea). Also we are all more than happy to have the rules bent either way and to value more the interpretation – our DM told us that if an action is well in character and well interpretated it counts as a natural 20 for example.
We find D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder very logical and very free, I think it’s a question of mindset (3 out of 4 of us ar Engineers…)