When I was running a lot of D&D in the late 70s and early 80s I started out as the puzzle sort of GM, but I ended up going more for a scenario approach - e.g. a city thing where the local assassins guild had a small hidden complex with a few cellars and buildings connected by tunnels, no monsters as such apart from a few giant rats used for garbage/corpse disposal and only a couple of pit traps etc., the snag was mostly the assassins themselves working together to fight off intruders then make sure that any survivors didn't get away to reveal the location of their base.

When I was running Call of Cthulhu a few years later I don't think I ever had more than one type of monster per adventure, and mostly only one creature. Players seemed to like to try to work out what they were dealing with from what they knew of the Mythos etc., and come up with plans that invariably fell foul of their poor choices. Most of the player character deaths were "friendly" fire accidents - idiots with guns and explosives running around in the dark and sometimes going insane are a recipe for disaster.

But I can accept that some people like to do things other ways, it just isn't my preference.