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To further on your observations: it really didn't take all that much to play anyway. An imaginative and descriptive DM, a few enthusiastic players, some dice, general character info sheets, and some basic play rules. Granted the rulebooks are what the publishers made money on. But me and my group of friends really had our own rules anyway.

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I participated in a multi-year campaign, sometimes for dozens of hours a week, almost always by phone. The DM would just render everything via speech, occasionally pausing to roll some dice. I still vividly remember some of the adventures. We'd read the AD&D texts, but mainly for ideas and the monstrous illustrations.

Wow. Wouldn't talking on the phone for hours in the pre-skype days become extremely expensive?

At least here in Germany we had affordable phone flatrates over ISDN way before Skype.

It was a local call, or cheap enough my parents never made a fuss about it. Outside of major cities, the US is so terribly spread-out that transit for kids is not very accessible.

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