I can see why trolls, troll some times. You can't say anything on the Internet without people losing their mind. What a thrill.
Doom to me has suffered from the, Goldeneye EffectTM. At the time, there was nothing better, and because of this, it was the ultimate experience. Almost 25 years later, the levels don't hold up. They're better than I can do, but they're not better than any of the wads on the, "Doomworld Community Top WADs of All Time" list.
You guys wanna flip what I say and turn it into your own platform to circlejerk each other and I'm just sitting here with an opinion. Doom is great. The levels in the first few years of its life were not very good.
Doom 2 was better from a gameplay perspective, but aesthetically I feel like they went backwards - in general - from Doom, The First. Again, it feels rushed. Considering it wasn't a priority to John Carmack at the time, and he was working on the next big thing... I think there's probably some truth in my claim, but I don't know for sure.
I'm not even saying that any of them aren't talented. I'm saying that they were new to the art, and it showed. My whole little diatribe about Doom's levels mentioned Sandy Peterson once, and it was after saying something like, "All of them were bad, but John Romero's weren't as bad." I'm not personally attacking anyone. I respect all of them as programmers and game designers, but I (capital I) don't play Doom for Doom, I play Doom for FreeDoom. I play it for the pwads.