I generally use Rolemaster as my system of choice for fantasy games. Sometimes I'm in the mood for 2nd edition with it's higher powered flavor and other times I prefer RMSS for the more rational treatment of skills and spells.

What they have in common is combat that is potentially deadly no matter how powerful the character gets, and that is as it should be in my book.

Yeah,  I'm a RM2 fan from way back - though I'll heartily endorse a lot of the criticisms made above - I think in many ways the game was designed to be a kind of "perfected" D&D, but what they ended up with wasn't really suited to having a lot of the D&D conventions applied to it.

As people have said, the effort that went into generating well-rounded characters was incompatible with the combat system if you wanted to play a hack n slash dungeon type game - though it's a great fit if you want to play a game that focusses on the threat of violence as a disincentive to actually engage in it, and treats combats as big set-piece climaxes rather than random encounters.

I'm also with rcsample on the low level magic issue - I loved that the sysyem had integrated "cantrips" (the prosiac lists from the spell users companion were great) all the way up to climate altering ritual magic, it made magic seem like a real part of the world instead of a series of combat tricks.  But why the hell would you make characters start out 5 levels away from being able to throw a firebolt?  I think new characters were generally just too weak - again something they got from basic D&D, but which didn't fit with the kind of investment RM demands.  I think kicking off at around level 5 makes a great deal more sense.

Character-building wise, you needed to loose a lot of stuff if you wanted non-fanatic fans to play, and I think I was always too much of a purist to do that.  Temp vs potential stats are, like communism, a great idea in theory, but when you tell a new player that he has to recalculate all his skill bonuses now that he's level 2 you realise that it's not really worth it.

I read an article in the house magazine (grey worlds I think) saying that RM2 was less an rpg and more an rpg creation kit - I think that's pretty accurate, and on those terms it was brilliant.

I like spacemaster, and have most of privateers, but I'd never run it at a convention, too hard to make that many characters, and it NEEDS a character creation program that does all the writing and printing for you.