If I Had To Do It Over . . .

I continue to enjoy the new campaign, though I've been letting the players do the adventure write-ups on our Obsidian Portal page. I don't regret the choice to run a 5E game at all--it plays fast, offers rules for non-combat options, but doesn't bog you down in precise math. But as I've noted before, it does give you a glut of options that overwhelm the human fighter which was a staple of earlier editions.

So if I had to do it over again, what would I do differently?

First, I'd probably start everyone off playing a human. Non-human races would only become available as characters once the PCs had made relatively peaceful contact with them. This would give me more room to define the demi-human races as something slightly different from their vanilla, LotR-inspired bases. The halflings might be your tree-dwelling forest people, and elves something more alien and eldrich. Dragonborn would make great enemies, at least at first, and perhaps I would more firmly base dwarves on Jewish archetypes, as Tolkien envisioned them.

Second, I'd limit the starting classes to fighter, rogue, ranger, wizard, and cleric. Other classes would become available as the party's horizons expanded--and some, like the druid and warlock, would tend to be antagonists against civilization, if not the party itself.

Third, I'd heavily modify the Lost Mines of Phandelver module, most likely taking some cues form Gus L's excellent dissection. Forget goblins--let's throw in savage human tribesmen. Forget your stereotypical English inn in Phandalin, let it literally be a barely-reconstructed ruin, with the canvas keeping out more rain than what's left of the roof. Make the Redbrands more powerful and a more interesting faction to deal with, etc.

Having done all that, I would still probably have set the campaign in Newold, just because it's a world that I know very well and love very much.