Games

I stopped paying attention to D&D (though not RPGs!) long before whatever schism you are referencing occurred. It's awful. But I know what I need to roll to hit armor class zero.

THAC0 is just subtraction instead of addition. I'll never understand the hate it got.
I have no problem with ascending armor classes and attack bonus. The math is the same. It's easy and intuitive. But if you're having issues subtracting whole numbers less than 20, you've got a problem bigger than the wrong game system.

Plus, SJG is a genuinely awesome company full of people who are really dedicated to the love of gaming. You don't feel like you're being exploited by fashion and capital. You feel like you're collaborating with your friends.

I don't know anything about Pathfinder but compared to even the TSR days of D&D, the culture is so much better around SJG, and it really shows in the quality and depth of the source books. They are absolutely amazing. The CIA confiscated early drafts of the Cyberpunk source book along with all their computer equipment, insisting, "This is real!" I learned so much as a kid about world religion from their primary Fantasy setting source book. The rules are very simple and elegant, exploiting the naturally occurring normal distribution provided by 3d6, which maps very well to the normal distribution of real life events and makes the plusses and minuses (or "adds" if you remember Tunnels and Trolls) a lot more meaningful, realistic, and interesting because +/-1 means something completely different in different situations.

What I appreciated most was the depth of character creation, while staying incredibly light weight. D&D always seemed like a video game where your character is nothing more than a class, some equipment and some basic stats, like it's specifically designed to produce dungeon grinds, and if you want to do anything else, that's up to the DM to figure out and mix in, but it's optional. With GURPS, you're designing an actual character in the literary sense, who has stories to explore and interests that necessarily interact with other character's interests. It's an actual role playing game.

GURPS has two letters that I think are the best: Generic and Universal. You can run anything in it and switch it up as much as you want. You could run campaigns similar to any of Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate, Sliders, Brisco County Jr, Walking Dead, Harry Potter, etc., and have the ability to do crossover episodes.

Unfortunately, not a lot of people are that involved in the game to care about OGL and its ramifications. Most only want to play what they've seen in Stranger Things or Critical Role, they don't give a fuck about the rent people they watch and like have to pay to WotC. I believe that's what Hasbro is banking on. They will not back out of OGL1.1 as they knew some more hardcore players would criticize them. But the way news and stories are consumed nowadays, they also knew this would quickly get buried by the unending stream of "information" people consume and ultimately be entirely forgotten or ignored. Most people don't care about businesses practices if it doesn't affect them directly. Mix that with the crazy amount of IP crossovers they made in the last couple of years and you start to see how they are setting up a model so basically anyone who's tempted to try table top gaming will most likely be funnelled into their ecosystem.