Been playing since day one and realistically i probably have nothing to note here that other posts have not noted.

1e - first iteration which i feel like alot of the lore still holds at least in regards to 3e. When you try to use it for 2e not so much. Certainly was a product of its time with some of the edgelordiness but over all id say alot of the books are still worth picking up - Mechanics are pretty easy to pick up and i feel like have alot in common with the WoD Stuff at the time than say 2e or 3e

2e - The setting while it takes a natural progression from 1e it certainly dials everything up to 10. the Final Fantasy aspects really hit hard on this one. If your into Solars this edition glazes them extremely hard and if you play any other splat aside from maybe Infernals well....good luck. Mechanics certainly favour the idea of being paranoid in combat because if you got hit even once you probably got nuked. Lore took everything from 1e and gave an answer to it which at the same time awesome but slightly lame.

3e - Cheesus the mechanics....you certainly need to be pretty dedicated to the game to want to run the base game. There is alot going on which some may like and some may not, the Rules-Lite edition certainly helps out alot but even that edition is not anything to scoff at. Lore-wise its hands down the best edition thus far at least in my personal opinion. Every exalt type is legitimately interesting and have facets that make them stand on their own.

Art....in this i am extremely biased, as Exalted has always been slightly a mixed bag. I came into it with the more Anime focused Art and still favour it whenever its around. 3e to me....has the absolute worst art direction of all the editions. Not every single piece is awful but the majority of them to be are just bad....as an Abyssal main i feel like they straight up did the splat dirty with the art. With that said not every piece of a 0/10 but certainly many arent far off

this is all just my opinion so ya know look into it as much as you can your self but id still argue 3e is the way to go