Why did Extended die a miserable death? That was during a time I quit magic (relevant: because of standard rotations).

Wizards might be playing it easy with Modern because of the experience they had with Extended. Not the same format since Modern doesn't explicitly rotate...but now they're forcing rotation...might be seeing them make the same mistakes again anyway.

I know I largely quit modern because the format became hugely uninteractive/"did you draw your sideboard", partially because they banned the decks that were able to squash the uninteractive combo decks.