Reading the rules of Starfinder is making me appreciate some of the streamlining that 5th Edition D&D does.
I don't mean this to badmouth Starfinder - the game looks insanely fun and I can't wait to run it - but there are little things about the way that Wizards of the Coast presents things that make it a lot easier to comprehend.
Last night, while reading through the Alien Archive to see what kind of creatures I could send up against my players in a hypothetical first session, I came across a few abilities that had no description in the stat block. Things like "Inexplicable Orders." I searched through conditions and spells and all manner of things, having no idea what these features actually did, until I realized that they were the subclass features of a particular kind of Mystic (which is one of the playable classes - kind of Cleric/Druid equivalent.)
There's a lot in the Alien Archive that serves to conserve space - when you get multiple examples of an alien creature that have a common ability, the second stat block will often say "see above," referring to the previous stat block. This does allow the creatures of a particular category to fit on a two-page spread, but it also requires a little more effort on the part of the GM to track down the ability.
WotC is going to be making significant changes to a lot of existing stat blocks with their Monsters of the Multiverse and 2024 "5.5" core rulebooks to make them easier to run. The notion of "class levels" for a monster were more or less done away with in 5th Edition (though they still have abilities that can detect them) in favor of just drilling down to the essentials to show what carries over. A rogue-like NPC stat block might have sneak attack, but you won't get bogged down in things like Uncanny Dodge or rogue subclass features, and the stat block itself will tell you what all the things do.
Spellcasting is going to be getting the most significant changes in the 5.5 rework, giving DMs less to track vis-a-vis spell slots and which spell the creature would actually use on a typical turn in combat.
Pathfinder (which led to Starfinder) was created in large part to preserve the feel of 3.5th Edition D&D after 4th edition introduced some significant changes to the way the game worked. 5th Edition was also a return to those roots, but clearly they chose different things to emphasize.
I will say that 5th Edition also has a big benefit in how enormous the Monster Manual is. Creating a level 1 adventure is never easy, given how limited you are in what sort of creatures you can have the party fight, but the 5th Edition Monster Manual has a pretty wide variety of options. Starfinder's Alien Archive is a much smaller book, and while there are certainly a few options, it definitely feels like there are CR ranges with only like 1 creature that fits it.
I do have to cut Paizo some slack, though. Within the TTRPG world, of course, Paizo is one of the big names. But I don't think that anyone is remotely on the same scale as Wizards of the Coast when it comes to the resources available to them. I'd imagine that for non-gamers (and even gamers who don't do TTRPGs,) D&D is the only such game they're remotely familiar with.
Among TTRPG veterans, I think one of the complaints people have made about D&D is how limited character options are. It's true that if I'm playing, say, a Soulknife Rogue, most levels I don't really have any choices to make about how my character progresses. Between feats and "tricks," not to mention skill ranks, it seems that Starfinder characters are going to be making significant choices every level. That's exciting, I think, for people who really like getting into the nitty gritty of strategy, but I can also imagine that for a lot of the people I play with, who like to focus a bit more on the roleplaying and character stuff, it might be intimidating.
I'm definitely going to try to run at least a one-shot, and hopefully some shorter campaign with the Starfinder system, but I think I might try to hybridize them a bit for a full campaign. I'd love to take the Starship rules almost wholecloth even if the base system I'd use for the player characters themselves is D&D. A sci-fi campaign would of course require that some of the skills be reworked, but I think that wouldn't be too terribly difficult.
Naturally, there's some hope that the sketch by Hydro74 teased during this year's D&D celebration could mean we've got a Spelljammer 5th Edition book coming out next year or so (even though Boo, the miniature giant space hamster, is actually from the Baldur's Gate games, which were not terrible spelljammer-focused) so I wonder if we'll get more 5E native spacefaring and science fantasy rules. We'll see.
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