Why are you incapable of admitting the slightest fault on the part of the official products?
There's always a sense of that when we discuss the current edition (or any edition or game, really). There are critics who refuse to see the good in it and make unreasonable, even flatly false accusations. There are apologists who refuse to see anything bad in it, and try to spin even the most botched bug as a 'feature.'
In this case, I'm afraid you're in at least as much danger of falling into the first category as Flamestrike is of the second.
Not policing the 5 minute adventuring day has been a bad idea since 1E. It got worse in 3E, slightly better (but still an issue) in 4E (at the cost of a feel of sameness), and is still an issue in 5E.
Resting 'early' has always been an issue. Different eds have dealt with it (or not) differently, or advised/expected/facilitated the DM dealing with it differently. Old-school expectations included things like random encounters to interrupt rests and changing risk/reward (to sum up a lot of factors) to discourage it. 3e didn't really offer anything new in that regard, and deepened the divide between daily and at-will classes in some ways, making it arguably 'worse.' 4e put all classes on the same resource schedule (so they could be balanced, mechanically, fairly consistently in spite of having unique features and powers) but encounter balance would still be thrown off by the 5MWD, so 'better, but a nearly-complete solution to
only half the problem.
Sure, 5e made it 'worse' again, but, as promised, gives us 'crystal clear guidance' as to where the resource-varied classes will all more or less balance: 6-8 medium-to-hard encounters with 2-3 short rests, per day. That's pretty clear. What we do with that guidance is on us.
Where 5E differs from 4E is that by lengthening or shortening the AD, you impact the different classes differently, and play with encounter difficulty differently. While this makes it more of an art than a science to police, it has the advantage of allowing you the DM to create AD's that favor some classes (shorter ones for the long rest classes to shine) and longer ones that let the short rest classes (and champion and rogue) to shine. You can mix with party dynamic and power levels simply by adding (or removing) encounters or short rests.
Exactly. There's a level of nuance to dealing with the issue, if you want to deal with. You can stick to the guidelines and probably be OK, assuming a typical party and 'all other things equal,' or you can approach the impact of more/fewer encounters/rests as a tool - a unpredictable, multivariate tool, put a powerful one if you get a feel for it. You can use it to compensate for an imbalanced party, for one player having more system mastery than another, or to create a different tone or feel in the campaign, and so forth.
And it's just one of many such tools 5e gives the Empowered DM.
Saying that the DM can enforce a 6-8 encounter day seems irrelevant to the argument that the game should have been balanced around a lower number of assumed encounters per day.
Unless the reasoning for why it should have been balanced around fewer encounters included an assumption that the DM couldn't do so, of course.
The bright spark is that 5e class balance seems much more about '2-3 short rests per long rest' than '6-8 fights per long rest'; 3-4 fights/day does strongly favour encounter-long Dailies like Wildshape & Barbarian rage, but not specifically Daily powers over Short Rest powers.
That does look like a sort of secondary balance-point. 6-8 encounters roughly balances any/all of the PH classes. 3-4 harder encounters with the same number of short rest balances /most/, but not so much those with significant all-encounter dailies. If you don't have a class like that (or do, and the PC is underperforming) there you go, a nice alternative.
So turning SR powers into Encounter
powers by making a Short Rest ca 15 minutes instead of 60 minutes seems to be the solution;
that way they get used 3-4 times/day, once per Short Rest becomes once per (most) Encounters.
You could go all the way and literally make them Encounter powers. As soon as you roll initiative, they're back. Even 4e didn't actually do that, there was a 5 min short rest.
I disagree that balance revolves around 2-3 short rests per long rest and that number of encounters plays no role.
The simple truth is that classes with better at will attacks thrive when the number of rounds in the adventure day is high. Fewer hard encounters don't increase number of rounds as much as more easier encounters.
By the numbers, sure, at-wills perform better relative to rest-recharge powers the more rounds you have in the day. Something that needs to be taken into account. However, recharge powers have more flexibility about when they give their best performance, so they're likely to be more dramatic, spotlight-grabbing - and significant to success. That implies they need to be, by the numbers, 'weaker' in total, than the at-will alternatives, to really 'balance,' leaving the at-will-dependent types some chance to shine, rather than just making seemingly-trivial contributions on some rounds, or even the majority of rounds. It's very tricky, because both straightforward numerical contributions /and/ softer factors come into play. No game has ever done a great job of it, that includes every version of D&D. The closest a design has ever come is to merely side-step the issue by simply not using one or the other, or sticking to a fixed ratio among them across the board.
