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Notes -
I think there's something meaningful to the McDonald's comparison, in that D&D is pretty generic even for generic systems.
If you want to play a game of emo band kids from beyond the edge of the universe (and/or maybe a My Chemical Romance fan meetup), who've lost even the passion to burn the whole system down in a metaphor for chronic illness, and instead go on Scooby-Doo hijinks together, there's absolutely no system I would recommend over Glitch. Brilliant mechanics, excellent system fluff, 5/5 stars.
Also pretty hard to get player buy-in, both in the terms of cooperation (blowing up the moon not helping is less of a reason to avoid it if you just want to get the session over with) and in terms of players enjoying things enough to come back again. And the system really pushes you toward that setting.
And there's a lot of that. A long Don't Rest Your Head campaign is kinda an oxymoron. You can kinda fudge-factor an Exalted 2e game to not turn into incredibly slow-paced-and-'cinematic' combat, but it suffers there, and it's kinda pointless for something like Anima Prime or anything using the HERO System. To play Dreaming Waters without involving cooperative filial piety and a lot of other genre conventions would involve throwing out the character sheets and a lot of the rules and starting again.
D20 System can't really do everything well, or even that broad of a set of things well, but it doesn't break in really wacky ways three sessions in just because you houseruled out an instant death mechanic or change the rates some spells recharge, and chances are someone else has already tried that particular approach (and probably sold a poorly-written OGL supplement about it). I don't think it's necessarily inherent to D&D so much as the rest of the field growing up around it has kinda turned it into the expansive median, but it does make it useful for a lot of people.
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