I don't see why iserith should be expected to temper what he's saying. The passages he quotes aren't suggestions; they are rules.
The problem isn't just whether any given passage between the covers is a 'rule,' guideline, mechanic, flavor text, suggestions, advice, or whatever - it's that even if you do decide to take a passage as a rule, the language (relatively informal and jargon-lite) has plenty of ambiguity and room for interpretation.
Sure, people might find it more persuasive if he stopped using that argument and instead explained why he finds the actual rules more enjoyable than some misinterpretation of them.
Because what he plays by isn't "the actual rules" and how other people read them isn't "misinterpretation" - they're /different interpretations/. 5e simply isn't written so unambiguously that a claim of RaW is meaningful. And, I really didn't care for what that attitude did to 3.x discussions - hate to see it happen to 5e, even just in this corner of the broader community.
If I wanted to go back to that, I could engage more with PF discussions.
What 5e has gotten back to, intentionally, and what TSR era D&D had going for it more or less by accident, is that lack of precision that allows each DM to get out of the game what he wants from it & brings to it, rather than /only/ what the writer 'intended.' It's a great accomplishment of 5e that different DMs can run in quite different styles, supported by quite different interpretations & rulings, yet still be "playing 5e" in the sense that everything they come up with is in accord with what's written in the book.
One is jargon that surely has some specific meaning to you, the other is what I actually said.
The meaning of 'RaW' is familiar to anyone that suffered through the community as it existed in the 3.x era, anyway, and that specific meaning is "what the book says," literally.
But, dang, this was a stupid shallow rabbit hole that leads nowhere I stepped into and really don't care about.
Long as you didn't break your ankle it's all good. ;P