It comes down to opposing philosophies. Without trying to sound too derisive, Crawl is a game made for gamers. It focuses on gameplay to the exclusion of all else. It's like those sports TV programs where they use aggressive editing to condense a 3.5 hour baseball down to 30 minutes.
NetHack comes from the opposite angle. It's the D&D world your brother's friend spent all summer creating while you were away on vacation. It's best enjoyed on a rainy Saturday afternoon when you've got a clear schedule ahead. Gamers might call it tedious or repetitive, but then so is knitting or dicing vegetables by hand. It's just not meant for people in a hurry.
It's a meditative exercise that also happens to be pretty challenging if you aren't a Munchkin. In that sense it's kind of like correspondence chess for one: sure, nobody's stopping you from cheating (or using other meta-game exploits) but you're really robbing yourself of a lot by doing that. On the other hand, reading books on chess theory (or the NetHack wiki) is just fine.
NetHack comes from the opposite angle. It's the D&D world your brother's friend spent all summer creating while you were away on vacation. It's best enjoyed on a rainy Saturday afternoon when you've got a clear schedule ahead. Gamers might call it tedious or repetitive, but then so is knitting or dicing vegetables by hand. It's just not meant for people in a hurry.
It's a meditative exercise that also happens to be pretty challenging if you aren't a Munchkin. In that sense it's kind of like correspondence chess for one: sure, nobody's stopping you from cheating (or using other meta-game exploits) but you're really robbing yourself of a lot by doing that. On the other hand, reading books on chess theory (or the NetHack wiki) is just fine.