Your question was, Are there literary/fantasy figures who are warlords? I answered.
It wasn't, actually.
I was just trying to point out that those literary/fantasy figures are in fact
not warlords,
because they are not D&D characters. Folks may wish to
interpret them as warlords, but that is subject to a lot of bias in the interpretation. (Obviously, given how many ways Aragorn, Gandalf, etc. have been presented on various blogs and articles over the years.)
The same is true for doing LotR and seeing "inspirational healing" in it. You wouldn't be, except 4e does it that way. The same effect which you see as inspirational healing might be a morale check, charisma check, bardic magic, or heaven knows what else given the breadth of 3pp nowadays.
I don't want to go through the rest of what you said point by point, other than to say...I actually agree with most of the points...its the implications or conclusions that people are getting hung up on.
Repeatedly people are saying "You can do the same with Paladin, Ranger, and Barbarian!" as if that somehow ends the discussion....Well, I think you
could do the same with them, and I'd be fine with it. (I tend to agree that monk works better as a rogue variant, and assassin certainly is.)
Taking a step out/back, I think this may be a bigger confusion/imprecision with class design. A problem that earlier editions had, 4e sorta got away from, and 5e appears to be resurrecting. Basically, classes aren't being designed or thought of with the same "width" or "breadth" of concept under them. So, "Fighter" is very broad compared to say "Monk". (Not
as true in 4e, IMO.) Since fighter is so broad, there is a lot of internal customization offered in the maneuver choices. Monk, only has a few options from his Ki ability and tradition.
You could go the opposite way, as well. (Some of the indie games have done this.) Fighter could be blown up into several classes (A sword+board guy, a big weapon guy, a dual-wielder, an archer, etc.) Each with very specific abilties and maneuvers. I wouldn't be the biggest fan of this system (with its zillion classes), and you'd need some pretty good multiclassing rules ('cause someone will always be looking for that zillion-first character), but it would work. Wizards could be deconstructed into any number of <X>-mancers.
Of course, which end of this spectrum works best can depend on other things about your mechanics as well. If your fiddly bits are individually pretty broad, you're probably better off going with the broader classes. In the extreme, that leads to classes games, where the fiddly bits do all the lifting. At the other end, you have fiddly bits that are very specific (at least in comparison) much more script-like and classes that are as well. If the rest of your system is in the middle, then your classes will come probably come down that way as well.
(to bring it back around)
I think some of what Mearls' has been saying these last few articles is that:
a) they are (most)comfortable with the level of abstraction that maneuvers seem to carry.
b) they'd like to get spells working more like that.
c) at that level of abstraction, Warlord is probably a fighter with maneuvers.
