"We Do it Because it's Old-School" -- A Rant

Something that I keep running into while browsing the many amateur games on the web is the belief that because something is "old-school", it must be better. I don't mean the rants that complain about how no-one makes good games anymore. What I mean is the way that bad design decisions keep cropping up, and are defended because they're "old-school".

One of my pet peeves is the maze-like pseudo-3d dungeon that was so popular in older CRPGs. (Think Wizardry and the really old D&D games.) The main thing that bugged me was that all the corridors looked the same, probably due to limited graphics. It was really easy to get lost (and I get lost really easily). I probably spent most of my time going in circles, which is why I'm not terribly fond of those games.

That by itself wouldn't have been so bad if there had been some sort of mapping feature in the game. But there wasn't. This was probably due to the limits of the system -- RAM, processing power and storage space, but also the programming language used and data structures available. Nowadays, however, none of those should be an excuse. I've seen some games that don't include a mapping feature in order to "make the game harder". Which I can almost accept, although I do think there are better ways to make games difficult than to help people get lost. What bugs me is the people who claim that they're doing it that way because that's the way games used to do it, and therefore it must be good. Lack of mapping did not make those games good!
I suppose the reason mapping is such a sore point with me is that computers can keep track of game maps far more easily than people can. The bottom line is that I think computers should be used to automate as much grunt-work as possible so you can skip to the fun parts of the game.