Daniel (@dungeondive) opens by anticipating the objection: why cover Temple of Elemental Evil, one of the most ubiquitous and basic dungeon crawls going, when the channel could be on something rarer? Because he wanted something he could set up and finish in an hour, and under those terms he thinks the D&D Adventure System is genuinely good.
His key claim is that these are not dungeon crawls at all. They have more in common with threat-management games like Pandemic or Defenders of the Realm — positioning puzzles rather than exploration games. Playing Alaeros the human fighter and Baerol the gold dwarf cleric, he spent the first turns playing it like Warhammer Quest, trying to clear monsters, and got his head handed to him. The loitering penalty is the teacher: fail to explore a new tile and you draw an encounter card, and the encounters are deadlier than the monsters. He survived the first adventure on both healing surges and a lucky Elf Archer ally that arrived as two figures and served as meat shields.
His complaint is presentation. An officially licensed D&D product with decades of fantasy art behind it ships cards with no art at all and bog-standard tiles — a real loss for table presence.
Approach a game wrong and it breaks. Which game only clicked once you stopped playing it like the genre it resembled?