"He's at the Hilton!" "Well then, let's go there!" "I dunno, it doesn't sound great. This guy only ranked it 2 stars, and apparently it really hates cops."

If you kill a PC with a recreation of the Boromir death scene, you might be able to hit all three at once!

And we played the first thing that came to our heads
Just so happened to be
The best song in the world
It was the best song in the world

They were being kind and assuming there was a miscommunication.

It's not the anger that's cowardly, it's the refusal to try. It's taking any other path, so long as you don't have to risk your own stupid pride. Have the humility to accept you might not make the right call, but the courage to actually make it for yourself.

This adventure comes from a time when modules were a toolbox. One of the most popular modules from the era had a plot of "there's a bunch of monsters in some nearby caves, and they don't all like each other". Tunnels were blocked by debris, allowing the DM to connect it to another dungeon they wanna try. You might come back to the same dungeon a second time, and the contents of the room will change. A module is a starting point, but the DM continues the story from there.

If you don't know how to prep that, then the empty room is a boon. If you do, then the empty room isn't an issue. If you don't want to prep a campaign like that, then maybe this style of module isn't for you in the first place.

I wasn't a good DM either. But then I learned. I threw encounters at the players I thought might be fun, and I missed the mark almost every single time. But my players had fun, so I don't see the problem in getting those encounters wrong. And every failure taught me so much more than every success.

If you fail, but you keep it fun and learn for the future, what have you lost? Only your pride.

But some monsters are strong against certain builds and weak against others. Some monsters are stronger in certain environment and entirely nullified by others. Some monsters are stronger given certain allies and weaker when alone.

If you could devise a system to assign monster complexity based on every scenario you can imagine that monster being part of, then either that's an astonishingly small number of scenarios or an absurdly complex calculation to force on anyone.

This is a room. After seeing dozens of rooms with monsters and furniture, you are given a room with nothing in it and told to fill it yourself. You know the general sort of thing that goes in the room, so all that's left is to decide precisely what. Everything before the room has been given to you, and everything after will be given as well. You just need to come up with one room.

You can have a paid product full of things to put into that room and not learn a damn thing about actually preparing rooms like that. You can memorise every entry on a multiplication table and still not know how to actually multiply two numbers. The most valuable teacher is experience, which is why you have to actually figure out what the gaps in the number sequence are.

So you can try. You can come up with a few monsters you think would be fun, and would fit into that room. You add a bookshelf and a table for flavour, and to make the fight a little bit more interesting. It could go well or it could go wrong, but you learn either way.

Or you can rage against the system that dared tell you to figure out a single room by yourself; dared to tell you to put your pride on the line and risk making a mistake.

The second one sounds cowardly to me.

I think it's mostly cowardice, personally. People don't want to risk putting their own choices into a game based entirely on choices, just in case they aren't as good. It's better to use someone else's decisions than risk your own pride.

Then you have ignorance. A lot of people don't know how to fill the gaps, and WotC has never bothered teaching them how. Any rules they did get are rules of thumb and aren't something to use without thought (like CR), so people complain for reason 1 again.

"You will reunite with a friend"
"The bad times will be over quickly"
"A sudden windfall will come your way"

That's bollocks. Whoever claimed that people used to draw dicks to ward off evil was talking out of their ass to make a dick pic seem classier. They were just embarrassed that their submission in an archeological journal was so similar to what they carved into their desk in school, and I'm damn certain the school desk isn't protected from evil either.

I find it funny that you directly quoted wikipedia to write that (exact wording from the paradox article, I checked), but ignored the sentence immediately before it (...or a statement that runs contrary to one's expectation). Also, the linked articles at the bottom include the unexpected hanging page. Maybe read the entire wiki page before citing it?

Also, in case wikipedia suddenly isn't enough, here's an article on wolfram to back me up: https://mathworld.wolfram.com/UnexpectedHangingParadox.html