Reign vs RQ is… a difficult comparison. They’re totally different beasts. Lets see if I can arrange my thoughts:

RQ:
Totally trad. Like, heavy trad trad. So fucking many skills trad. So much assumptions of length of play and what play looks like trad. Such very good trad. So tried and true trad.

Plus, the new edition is just goddamn gorgeous, and the lifts from Pendragon around pattern of play are all very solid.

Setting wise, it’s a setting. It’s like the king of deep settings that have gotten out of control for 40 years and now are trying to be beaten into submission. It’s a setting that’s a combination of skilfully constructed published setting and stuff that multiple different groups just randomly made up while playing one night, jotted down in the marginalia, and had it become part of the setting indistinguishable from the original so that then geeks spent 25 years fighting about it and no one fucking agreed about any damn thing. But then they spent a couple years trying to make sense of it and published it in a mostly coherent, but sill weird hippy Joseph Campbell 70s Pot Shaman setting with gorgeous neo-Campbellian pseudo-mythic art.

Reign:
Based on trad ideas about GM and player rolls, but breaking down some of those divisions and trying to focus play on a specific axis outside of just “wandering heroes.” Ironically, the system would work pretty well for Glorantha games where the players are actually leaders and planners, rather than wandering adventurers who are connected to communities by the need to heroquest.

Haven’t seen the new edition (obvs), but the old edition was gorgeous. Amazing layout. (Turns out it was because it was by Solis, but this was before I knew who he was.)

The setting… exists. But it isn’t like a big coherent setting where everything is defined in the world. It’s a big container with some general, and clear rules, filled with nifty bits of awesome color. The GM, and maybe the players through Company creation, decide what actually matters out of that big box of awesome tools.

So… if you don’t do setting, and are worried about heavy system crunch and creep… I’d go for Reign. And that’s despite the fact that I love the living fuck out of the new Runequest.