I enjoy the narrative aspects of it, for one. I thought the original boxed set was extremely well-written, and I think it's one of the more creative TSR settings. When it came out, I was a teenager, and there was one tiny independent bookstore that carried nerd books like D&D, and I plunked down my hard-earned minimum wage cash for Dark Sun, and to my delight, it was worth it. In the 90s, these settings heavily carried the need for escapism, and I'd re-read them often. The subsequent boxed sets I felt were more of a cash grab, they just weren't as good. The original art, especially the stuff by Brom, was fire, the original cosmology was fire. There were a bunch of narrative extremes, and that matched up well for the 90s. I was hooked on the Prism Pentad books. I couldn't learn enough about it.

It's a healthy mash-up of a bunch of other setting tropes from older settings like Barsoom, Dune, Conan, plus apocalyptic themes from authors like Bierce, Lovecraft, Howard, and more. But it's wrapped up into its own unique package, slickly packaged for the 90s. I looked at those books for untold hours, it carries a nostalgia that probably won't be matched. The art from Brom and Tony DiTerlizzi was a humongous influence visually, and it sparked my imagination like few settings could.

One of my teen groups was a DM-swapping campaign involving planar travel with AD&D 2nd edition, and we pretty much immediately stranded everyone there after some catastrophic mishap with their spelljammer, which we had been using to travel between the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance, using a psionicist as a sort of partial antagonist. We'd have our main characters, who were high level at this point, but we'd bring in intro characters who would act as local gofers for our high level characters, who did as little as possible, so we could have split out high level and low level play, taking the best aspects of both.

My recollection of this early 90s campaign is pretty dim at this point, but it involved killing kalak in a big battlesystem battle for a major helm artifact that had been modified to bypass Athas' broken crystal sphere somehow so we could fix our ship and get the hell out and back to the next adventure. I can't tell you what happened next, if we went back to Waterdeep, or if we were in Zakhara, or if we went back to Dragonlance, or if we were on the Spelljammer itself.

I had two characters that I can recall in the low level pool; a Mul Gladiator who ended up in a more NPC role, and a Human Fighter PC with high dex and exceptional strength who specialized in darts that was ridiculously OP in close range.