Yes, Traveller was the initially brutal RPG and a lot of them got worse from there. Twilight 2000 (actually, anything by GDW including their versions of Traveller) and the Aliens RPG were the most brutal. CyberPunk 2020, Mekton, and a few others were also brutal, but not as much. I mean, it's one thing if you can instantly die in a gun fight. It's another if you not only have to deal with that, but also realistic healing times/surgery requirements/infection rates... ugh. Yeah, I'm looking at you Twilight 2000.2000%. There weren't many games that took on this notion; I remember 1st and 2nd edition of Cyberpunk (1988 1st edition IIRC) doing similar in that you'd start with a randomised history where you'd made enemies, allies, friends and other (+/-ve) bonuses. You could keep 'advancing' through your timeline at your own benefit/downfall. Though TBF a good games master/storyteller/whatever would only use either good or bad for plot line embellishment and campaign 'flavouring'.
I got together with some friends and we actually really enjoyed the character creation process in ED. It was fair and enabled players to be 'a bit of this and a bit of that' or 'a lot of this and not much else'. Time, work, age and being old gits prevented us from going further but it's always on the horizon.
To me Traveller in many ways was ahead of the time for other RPGs. Brutal, realistic (in terms of getting squished) and not dissimilar to the brutal realism of Runequest. Bear in mind that both reared their heads around the mid-to-late 70s when you could still be a level 7 cheese maker in Basements and Lizards (sorry, was NEVER a fan of that game, even in the early 80s - give me Dragon Warriors any day). Oh, and don't get me started on SW D20. Level 3 Jedi, 11 hit points, AC 6 <SHUDDER>
I really liked the career choice and character building plus merits and flaws of the ED RPG. My only (personal) criticism of ED RPG was that (like CP 2020) was the 'equality' of stats/skills - was never a fan of that - i.e. if you had 10 (max) agility and 10 (max) rifles that was your total (20). Would rather halve the stats so that the skills were more 'important' than the stats when rolling. But, to be fair, the rules DID say 'change these rules to suit your needs'. So my criticism is probably unfounded because game-wise it's actually a good balance and you can make changes in the difficulties as you saw fit.
In retrospect it's a real shame the Spidermind games books were published pre-EDO. But, ignoring that, I think they did a darn good effort with what they had - game lore and technology available in-game - at the time. What would be good is a concerted effort to map the post-EDO rules into the game but am not sure what the IP issues are on that - you've got SM games and FD to take into acount.
I'd loved to have seen aditional modules on top of the ones created for ED RPG, along the lines produced by WEG for Star Wars. But when I used to RPG PC games were 8 bit and the landscape has changed a lot since then - I feel that PC games have filled a large niche where RPGs used to be the rule when computer power was much, much lower.
While I have no problem (I think it's neat, actually) that almost all versions of Traveller have players playing characters in middle-age - with their skills coming from past jobs - the problem I've always had (with all versions) is due to long travel times, for short distances, your characters may become "too old" to function in a long campaign. The fast travel times in the ED RPG eliminate that. Yes, I know most versions of Traveller do have anti-aging drugs (that you have to continually take) but usually they are prohibitively expensive and often illegal. That's not the case in ED (e.g. progenitor cells and Vitadyne nanomeds).
As to what has really kept us from playing ED RPG or the latest version of Traveller - we're all older and no one (usually me) has time to develop a campaign. We usually just play board games instead (e.g. Freedom Five, Nemesis (original and the sequel), etc.).
Spidermind did an excellent job with what they had at the time. I'd really love it if they updated the system. As for the changes in RPGs vs computer games over the years, yeah, I'm right there with you. Honestly, whatever I would run, I would need to have a laptop (or iPad) handy to help me keep track of everything. Modern mapping system would be good too. That's why I'm always interested in the virutal table top providers for these games... unfortunately, most are just too much trouble to learn/manage to be worth it for me.
