Thomas Shey
Legend
There is nothing less realistic, as far as fighting and injury are concerned, about the fiction we create in Prince Valiant than the fiction we create in Rolemaster - eg, when a PC knight was run through the shoulder by a skeleton lord's magic two-handed sword, his recovery took a long time. And it doesn't create long periods of uninteresting calculation and technical reasoning at the table. But it is all done by GM stipulation, not "organically/emergently".
Does that give you a sense of what I have in mind?
[Wanted to note I found most of this post well put together and on-point, since I'm going to take some issue with this part.]
I think, as with most such ad-hoc GM decisions for things, its more accurate to say "there's nothing automatically less realistic" here. "A long time" is very vague by nature, and can range from "about right" to "way off". When it comes to adjucating such things, people's judgments can vary considerably in quality. There's no assurance that a set of rules has it right either, but it at least A) has the benefit that you can pretty much count on everybody participating being on the same page and B) if it matters to you (and to make it clear, it may not much) it can be addressed systematically which is pretty hard to do with one-off decisions.