I used to love playing NetHack and ascended multiple times. Sometimes I wish DCSS hadn't ruined NetHack's UX for me. I'd love to see NetHack reimagined with a friendly UI on-par with DCSS and other modern roguelikes.
I'm in the same boat (although I never managed to ascend in nethack). DCSS is really a great game with stellar design and UX. I think the problems with NH go beyond the UX, it's the whole balance and progression that's clunky. In particular a lot of very important mechanics are very difficult to figure out without reading spoilers. Simply figuring out what cursed items do and how to get rid of the curse is rather complicated. Meanwhile in DCSS it's extremely simplified, IMO for the best.
If some people reading this thread are interested in trying a roguelike for the first time I strongly suggest not going for Nethack, unless you really enjoy not understanding 90% of what's happening and dying repeatedly on the first few levels. DCSS is definitely a good entry point, I think Angband is also easier on beginners (it can be very difficult to finish it but the early game is more straightforward than NH).
DCSS suffers from the "Star Trek hallway" problem. In ST:TNG, many episodes feature officers striding through hallways determinedly while not advancing the plot at all.
Similarly in DCSS the levels are so large and there's so much space between interesting bits, that you spend a fair amount of your time mindlessly pressing keys to stride through the hallways.
Mind you, DCSS is much better about this than Nethack because there are things like waypoints and fast travel, loot/stash search (with ^F), etc. I'm not contesting that it's better than Nethack in this respect.
But if I may say, Brogue is better about this in that there are very few 'wasted' turns: the food clock is very finely tuned so you really can't waste too much time or you'll die, levels are very compact so there's not as much exploring to do (but there's just as much tactical depth on each level, if not more, because of how the environment works in Brogue).
DCSS has been incredibly streamlined this decade with tons of quirky features being removed. You can spend most of your time playing it spamming the 'o' (auto-explore) and 'tab' (auto-engage enemies) key without missing out on much.
When you're not auto-o-tabbing, i.e. when you encounter more dangerous monsters, the game rewards tedious habits such as playing very conservatively (hide and seek, kiting, climbing up/resting/climbing down/etc.).
An explanation was that the dev team targets the top players first and doesn't want to allow them to find a way to suddenly cheese through the game, so they lock down on every quirk, feature or strategy that lets them do so. Problem is, the top players are really good and always find another way to cheese, so the devs play a game of cat and mouse to streamline the game further in the name of balance. Meanwhile, newbies struggle and mid-players get bored.
Nethack, among other games, has inspired my try at the dungeon crawler RPG that I work on during my free-time. But, I must admit, the code's not very good...
Nethack 4 is explicitly not an official successor project, and in fact the developer of NH4 has joined the original Nethack dev team to port interface improvements.
If some people reading this thread are interested in trying a roguelike for the first time I strongly suggest not going for Nethack, unless you really enjoy not understanding 90% of what's happening and dying repeatedly on the first few levels. DCSS is definitely a good entry point, I think Angband is also easier on beginners (it can be very difficult to finish it but the early game is more straightforward than NH).