Tony Vargas
Legend
"Best played without optimization" would mean horribly vulnerable to game-wrecking abuse via optimization. ;PBest played without optimization is personal taste, not a system feature.
Any sufficiently competent DM should be able to save 5e from such a fate.
The 'rewards for system mastery' vary as well as the opportunities for optimization (or just customization). 3e offered by far the greatest rewards for system mastery or optimization, often quite disproportionate, and you could just stumble onto them. Picking a Tier 1 class, for instance, over-rewarded you before you even started to optimize it. 4e also had lots of opportunities to optimize or customize, but the rewards were muted because it was so robustly balanced. 5e just plain has less material and fewer options, so less opportunities for customization & optimization. But there are still some significant rewards to be had here and there, high DPR through certain combos, the tremendous versatility of neo-Vancian casting...Anything can be optimized, the questions are only how and to what degree. 5E is definitely open to optimization, just not to the same degree as 3E or 4E. I don't see where your "playing without it" statement has anything to do with anything.
Storyteller had taken over for my group at the time, too, by '95 when my 10-year AD&D campaign wrapped with most of the PCs around 14th level. But, yeah, I acculturated to the RPG hobby in the 80s, thoroughly as I enjoyed the oWoD in the 90s.When I was playing 2E, traditional AD&D was on its way out the door if not already gone for us. Vampire the Masquerade, Chrono Trigger, and Dragonball Z had more influence on our table than tradition did.
I have one player, in particular, who I wish would pick up on that tactic. She gets so frustrated with the traditional dungeon-crawling that 5e so nicely evokes.The boring minutia part is exactly it, the idea is to sit out the boring while still technically participating.