Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
Visualize =/= re-fluff. You can visualize your elf as a 5000 tall elven godzilla if you want and the DM can't stop you. The game reality, though, is that your PC is an elf sized elf. The world is going to treat and react to your PC as an elf sized elf.I think it depends on what is being re-fluffed.
WotC and all kinds of other people had made mention in many years in the past the idea that for instance you can fluff your Magic Missiles however you want. The mechanics would remain as 1d4+1 Force damage per missile... but you could make them look like purple lasers, or balls of plasma, or a stream of rubber ducks. Didn't matter. Whatever you wanted to see them as, it was fine. And while the DM could of course argue with you and say "Nuh uh! They don't look like that!"... the player's visualizing the scene however they want, including how their Magic Missiles look. And no amount of DM whining would change that. The player is fluffing their spell in whatever manner they choose.
By the same token... if (general) you as a player visualize in your head how a Channel Divinity looks in-game, and it is different than how you see a Spell looking when it is cast in-game... that's cool. Nice bit of fluff differential on your part. But that is entirely in (general) your own head. You could just as easily be a person for whom the visualization of a Channel and a Spell don't look different at all-- there's like a glow around the Cleric's hands, and then POOF! some effect happens. Yes, the game mechanics of the two would be different (different resource pools for instance), but how they actually are fluffed in the game world does not and need not be different. Or they can be. It's up to the player to decide how they are seeing the effects play out.
Players cannot re-fluff a single thing without DM approval which often does not come.
In this case it isn't even a matter of "see." Someone who visualizes their spell as some sort of 2014 smite is going to be sorely disabused the first time that he can't do his "re-fluffed" smite in a silence, antimagic zone and/or is counterspelled.Just because a person can't make the change of seeing Divine Smite the spell the same way they see Divine smite the cleric ability is no reason WotC should necessarily throw out potentially good ideas in my opinion. But who knows? Maybe WotC will see enough resistance to this idea and roll it back? Whatever happens, happens.
In the mean time, my 2014 paladin standing right next to his will be smiting to his heart's content right next to him in that antimagic zone.