there's also 5e hardcore mode by the guy who made ICRPG, I think there a few more that add/change stuff wholesale, and a myriad of more specific stuff like kingdom building etc. I don't play or really follow 5e anymore, I mostly see the discussion (quite frequently) about it and the kickstarters in the places I lurk. plus 5e is probably the biggest edition ever, there has to be a large amount of third party content (licensed and otherwise) based on statistics alone.
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as for homebrew, might be me but these days I equal homebrew with broken (mostly from personal experience), can work out but otherwise not worth the headache and stress.
I equate anything homebrew with broken as well. Even my own home brew. (especially if its my own homebrew)
But you gotta play test your shit sometime, somewhere. So if its my homebrew, or someone else at the table's homebrew that I completely trust and have read through, I'll try it out. If its something from reddit or some wiki/forum, you want to break the game with, you can fuck right off.
Part of the problem with homebrewing off of 5e is 5e is heavily play tested so other than a few woopsies (Crossbow expert) when you try to homebrew out of it you're going to fuck up the balance somewhere. The best results are usually where keep combat (and maybe magic) and build their own races/classes.
I would also say:
I think 5e has the most people playing it, but I think 1eA in the peak years had a greater percentage of the American population playing it. I think 5e also has the most 3rd party content being developed for using any metric, just because of the internet, wordprocessors, the exceptionally low cost of digital publishing, and people aren't doing math on slide rules anymore.
I think you really need to have your players reflect on what they even mean with "too simple". combat, class progression, mechanics, etc...? without that replacing one thing for another completely and hoping for the best won't really fix stuff. anyway, for suggestions I have a mate swearing on savage worlds (if you don't wanna go full gurps), or PF2 (but coming from me that's not really an objective suggestion, it does fix (ymmv) 5e's "boring/simple" class progression however).
I've never gotten a group for savage worlds, but I will say:
Firstly, I've never known a Savage Worlds group to hold together longer than about a dozen sessions. SW doesn't seem to lend itself to long-term attention spans.
Second, card-based probability always sounds better than it actually works out to be.
I remember the speds from Penny Arcade were test-running some game... Thornbriar? Briarwood? Something like that, that had an interesting sounding mechanic: your class' actions were a deck you built, and when you took damage you added wound cards to your deck. To perform an action, you discard the card - some cards go back into you hand, some required you to discard additional cards, some are gone. You couldn't discard wound cards, so if your hand was nothing but wound cards you were dead. Healers let other people discard woundcards.
It seemed like a really fun mix of deck-building and pressing your luck - but jesus christ would it it be easy for a game to go to utter shit on you because of a bad shuffle.
