The-Magic-Sword
Small Ball Archmage
I think you even need to step beyond that, you have to question whether you're emulating fiction about heists, or if you're emulating the concept of heists. Because watching the problem-solving process in a movie probably isn't very fun, it could be good fun in a participatory medium. TTRPGs have the potential to tell the story of a heist better than the heist fiction we might otherwise try to emulate. Which is one of the interesting discourses in and of itself, are we going through the motions of genre as presented within the constraints of non-participatory mediums, or are we presenting the concept they sought to present in the first place?So, that's a great point. It leads us to then ask the question "What is a heist game?" Or, to generalize, "What are the key elements of whatever focus a game has."
One major trope of heist genre media and fiction is that the planning and preparation is generally glossed over with a montage - the characters case the joint, come back with information, and a plan appears pretty magically, often by invoking a made-up name of the style of heist/grift the characters will use.
Someone entering a heist-genre focused game expecting to actually do the planning is walking into a play expectation mismatch. And that's not the game's fault - that's a Session Zero fault.
For me, that's a big part of what makes TTRPGs so engaging, seeing things that are often glossed over in the need to drive the plot and immersing myself within the organically interesting portions of that world's status quo. A heist movie has a story in needs to tell in which the heist is a sequence of events, but a heist game can be fully engaging simply via the actual play experience of planning and executing a heist.