I prefer systems that concentrate on doing one thing rather than being universal and doing a ton of things, but I think for a new group it would be nice to try one of these.
I personally like D6 System. It's versatile, simple and fast-paced. It's not very intimidating and quite easy to learn. If you want well-rounded system, I would recommend going with this.
Folks on Veeky Forums love to bash Dungeon World, but it's pretty fun game. It may be limited a little bit, but it's incredibly simple to learn and run. If I would want to have a bigger focus on narrative, I would pick this.
Savage Worlds wight be a bit wonky, but it's still pretty easy and fast-paced. However, SW is mostly suited for relatively simple action stuff like Sword & Sorcery. I had experience with SLA Industries conversion to SW and I found it to be decent. If you want a middle ground between previous two examples, then try SW.
>What habits do you think it cultivated?
As I said, it's mostly subjective opinion, but it's based on my experience with other players and GMs.
A lot of times when a person starts with D&D, he mostly sticks with D&D, and as a force of habit a lot of people are hard to convince to play/GM something other than D&D.
D&D has it's own specific structure and formula, and because of system's widespread status a lot of people project D&D play-style on other systems, even if they deviate from aforementioned skeleton.
Generic nature and popularity of D&D evoke a lot of metagaming in D&D itself.
I'm not saying that D&D is a terrible system, but from what I saw, those problems often arise when a person starts with D&D and plays it almost exclusively. A lot of those habits come from inexperience with other systems/play-styles, and they don't automatically mean that someone is a bad GM or player. However, it takes a lot of time for some people to overcome those habits, and because of that I advice not to start with D&D.