5e is the most accessible (available everywhere and easy to find), but it's not the most accessible (easy to learn and play)

The 5e ruleset sucks, actually. It's deceptively complicated and the books are organized very poorly.

Even Baldur's Gate 3 gets a bunch of 5e rules wrong, sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident, because the rulebooks are poorly written and sometimes contradictory

Pathfinder might not be any better as a starting game, but there are much easier beginner games out there. The only problem is no one has heard of them because D&D eats absolutely all of the oxygen in the TTRPG space

I thought the same as the person you're replying to, once - and then I tried to go through the (original 5E) PHB's character creation rules, and realized that they are actually written very badly, and that I've come to rely heavily on DNDBeyond for character creation.

I haven't looked at the 2024 5E character creation part of PHB, but I can't imagine it's worse, lol.

> Pathfinder might not be any better as a starting game, but there are much easier beginner games out there. The only problem is no one has heard of them because D&D eats absolutely all of the oxygen in the TTRPG space

I couldn't agree more! Pathfinder is too crunchy for new players who don't already have experience playing TTRPGs, and are sure they want that level of mechanics in their game. There are so many RPGs out there, ranging from one-pagers that could probably be printed on an index card (The Witch Is Dead), to something on par with 5E's complexity that nevertheless has a lot of interesting mechanics and stories to tell (Wildsea, Spire).