Iirc Dragonlance was some groups own DnD campaign to begin with, that they then wrote books about and it somehow ended up a published setting.
So was Greyhawk. And they were both from campaigns that high ups in TSR were playing so it makes sense that they wound up published.
I see. I new about Greyhawk being Gygax's campaign setting, I just didn't know the Dragonlance people were involved with DnD in that way. That would definitly explain it, yeah.
Dragonlance has some interesting ideas in it. The magic being influenced by the moons, different types of dwarves and draconians.
I think my favourite book is "Flint the King" which focuses on the lowest dwarven society rung, the gully dwarves. It's a silly book with the gully dwarves being cheerful but nearly incapable of following any orders at all. The message of "bravery in the unlikeliest of places".
Dragonlance did strike me as being more light hearted than Forgotten Realms. Or maybe more "knights in shining armour".
I think it's less "knight in shining armour" and more "very informed black and white morality", which is why you get stuff like the super annoying chronically criminal kender bring heralded as "everything that is good and innocent about the world" when in fact they are just inconsiderate arseholes. It is a setting where the "forces of good" is so because the writers tell you they are, and probably has some of the worst incorporations of bad DnD tropes (like the alignment system), and unlike other settings you can't ignore it as the whole setting hinges on those metaphysics.
I agree about Forgotten Realms though, it seems generic and trite.
I think one of the few saving graces of FR is that the world feels like it doesn't exist for a pre-defined narrative. Unlike many other generic-ish settings there is no Mordor or Cthol Murgos or "darkspawn corruption" looming in one if the corners from which all really evil things stem or where the Dark Lord Orcus sits on his throne. It's just a huge world for adventures to take place in, and you can fit any kind of story into into it.
It might also be that even while the body of the setting might still be DnD generic, it's gotten a lot of nice, customized clothes to dress in over the years (it's a kind of super-developed genericality rather than underdeveloped). So it still stands out as "separate" from the standard issue DnD. 5th edition may change this, though, as they seem to be trying to make FR into that standard issue.
I'm also not sure how you could call Dragonlance interesting and FR "generic and trite" in the same breath. They both seem to he the same "generica with a few twists" to me.
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