This has been a very interesting read that has killed productivity for me lately.
Thank you all.
I shall now attempt to incite further productivity death....
The DMG quotes seem to support a different game than the one presented in the PHB. Taking into consideration all the wisdom in those quotes all one needs are a few simple rules and a few guidelines on making effective rulings. It seems that the only thing out of place about it all are the hundreds of pages of rules that tell you exactly when you can push, pull, slide, and fart.
The difference between the PHB and DMG "philosophies" is not a bug, it's a feature.
The PHB gives you the tools to interact with an imagined world. Period. (included caveat: the DM can change this as needed). You need lots of those rules in place for reasons of depth and choice for the players. However, the PHB doesn't do a whole ton of parting the veil. It isn't necessarily intended for the players to think about "the physics engine" as it were. When you are playing a video game, if you stop and think about how the terrain is being rendered.... the game has failed to sell you the illusion. One could make a case that the same applies here. Ideally, the players shouldn't see the strings. In fact, it's more fun when they don't (IMO. When I want to interact with the strings, I'll DM). They really don't want to know when the DM fudged a dice roll to help them take out the BBEG, for example. The majority want to play a game, not meditate on a philosophical mountaintop about the meaning of narrativist versus simulationist tropes. In any case, the tropes that are readily available to them are all very gamist (if they choose to think of them as such).
The DMG, on the other hand,
lives on the other side of the veil (or behind the curtain, if you prefer). The DM needs to be aware that there are things more important than the rules. The DM needs to spend a least a little cognitive power in a very meta place. He needs to see the strings, and pluck or pull the right ones as needed.
The problem is that people have taken the term "implied setting" to extravagant heights. They are also looking for some vast unity of principle for no discernible reason.
Vast unitary principles might be philosophically satisfying (to some), but they are not necessarily fun. (They can be fun. But they are not inherently so anymore than a polyglot is inherently badwrongfun)
But beware that that a consistent formal logic is incomplete, that means there are true properties that you cannot prove via your logic.
You likely just broke the brain of many people who think they understand logic.
Which is reminding me of an old truism about people who understand binary....
While I'm on the subject of logic..... if the outcomes of events in your world are determined regularly by the rules of any game system I've ever seen or heard of.... your world is NOT "logical."
It may have been very logical and internally consistent before the player characters got there, but I'm sorry, there is no set of rules that won't dump logic down the rabbit hole fast.
Also... "logical" worlds are not realistic. Study history or psychology for 5 minutes and you realize that human beings and animals are not only really, really stupid, but defy expectations and logic with such consistency that one day we really, really need to start expecting it.
The same could be said for game balance, but that's been made an all-consuming false idol at the expense of believability. It's just the result of an extreme stance that I'm railing against, and you're cheerleading for, for some reason.
I've bumped into more people who I could never get to play again "because the only classes worth playing have spells" than people who were obsessed with "believability" in their game about slaying orcs and dragons.
There may be a market issue there.