If your defense to the resting system is the DM has sole authority when it comes to making rulings then why would you be adamantly against talking about adjudicating a ruling about the resting system when it doesn't work for the millions of the other people that are using the system that it doesn't work for?
Because it works for the millions of people out there, obviously. It does not work for you because you are using the system at cross purpose, but if it was as flawed as you say, it would have been corrected by then.
That's edging really close to crossfire logic. Where if somebody else had a different experience in a similar circumstance the other party is obviously wrong.
The circumstances are not similar. I'm not forcing the game system to do something it was not designed for.
You don't have to look too far to find inconsistencies with the rest system within the rules regardless of the level in which you are supporting your decisions with the rule. DM should probably be striving for consistency in ruling as well as well as fairness
This is where you are, once again, wrong. First, consistency of the world and the story may well surpass (and indeed it does in story oriented games) consistency of rules. Moreover,, once more, 5e has "rulings over rules" because it rightly recognises that the circumstances in an open world are far more important than technical rules could be, and that there will always be difference in circumstances that might justify different local rulings. This is explained extremely well in the rules and in the SAC, but it's obviously part of the rules that you don't read because it contradicts what you expect of the game. Once more, the inconsistency here is all yours, trying to apply YOUR ideas to a system that was built along a different set of ideas.
so you can't just waive criticisms with an appeal to the assumption that the majority of people agree that the discussion is unwarranted.
Of course I can, the discussion IS unwarranted, since you are part of a minority that heavily criticises a system by applying paradigms of previous editions instead of those of the new one because you don't like them. So your criticism and the corresponding discussion is indeed unwarranted since it's based on something that only exists in your mind, not in the game as published, i.e. the 5e set of rules and another edition spirit
Whenever I'm talking about the game with fellow DMs rest and recovery is always in the top five issues that crop up.
You are only talking to like minded people. Among the DMs at our tables and all the one that I've discussed with, it certainly does not make any list, we are perfectly happy with it since our players do not try to distort it for technical reasons.
It is the single largest toggle for adjusting tension and difficulty with absolutely zero system support. It doesn't matter how much your game focused on story or combat or running a make believe interactive economy. You can't have that much of the system with no support. And I do mean zero support there's nothing in the printed material that gives you any suggestions on how adjusting the pacing using rest one way or the other has an effect on the game. The only thing they included the half-hearted suggestion based on what work kind of for them sometimes but they don't go as far as even giving you the baseline in which they made that judgment.
And that's because no support is needed if you think about it naturally and let events happen.
For example you could have a player who chose the dream druid subclass and they have a mechanical feature based on when a rest is attempted to be started but there is no rules and when a rest is started only in it's completion. You could say that the DM will have to make a decision one way or the other and that's fair. But it's also just as fair to say that the rest system is inherently flawed for these problems to occur.
And again, no, it's not, since the party does not consist only of a druid, there are other classes there, and they don't exist in a vacuum, they live in a world, with its own events and story, and no guide will EVER be able to guide you through all these elements. 5e only recognises that, and no problems occur when people are letting THESE principles guide them instead of asking themselves mechanical questions about mechanical features in isolation from the game itself.
The game is meant to be played as described, no theorised for hours by a guy trying to optimise the recovery of his druid in a complete vacuum.
They didn't need to include pages of massive walls of text to include some supportive rules for resting. You could probably come up with a bridged cheat sheet for how it affects the game and get it in less than 40 words or even a table it actually contains useful information instead of a random generation table that they love to throw in books.
Then please publish that and see how successful it is. I would certainly not buy it, I don't need it, I don't need to complicate my games and burden it for theoretical reasons. And I very much doubt that it would be a fraction as successful as a game that does not need that kind of thing to thrive, obviously.
