I think it's important to accept that for some people doing that is a big part of their gameplay fun THEN design so they can have it and other deeper/more nuanced styles of optimization bred gameplay have room to flourish in the other 5 stats(or other areas). Some editions do that better than other editions.
Oh, absolutely. This is why transparent design is such a big deal. By making your design transparent, you enable those players who don't want to dance to the expected tune to see exactly what cost they're paying, if they care to, and thus enable them to mitigate that choice if it suits their fancy. By contrast, an obfuscated game is going to have continuous issues with players not realizing that the thing they've done purely because it sounds cool is directly (albeit subtly) leading to long-term dissatisfaction with the play experience, even though every component of what they're trying to do aligns with the rules and with their personal interests.
And I can say that with confidence because that's exactly what happened to me in 3e. That's where I was before I tried 4e, back either before it existed or when I was (believe it or not) a 4e hater because I'd never played it and a former friend told me it was hot garbage (despite the fact that she, also, had not played it.) Really reading (and playing) 4e was an epiphany. I finally saw how my dissatisfaction with 3.X had had nothing to do with all the things I'd been trying to fix. I've been trying to find just the right homebrew Paladin or PrC option or feat or whatever to make the experience work, and assuming I just wasn't having good luck finding that stuff. It turned out, I wanted a system that actually made good on the kind of game 3e sold itself as being, because 3e manifestly failed to be that game.
That's not what the metagame or meta for short is. That's just optimisation.
Likely a clash of definitions. Optimization is a form of meta-game thinking, in that it is not thinking about playing the game, but rather about how the game is (or should be) played, much as ethics is the study of correct behavior and meta-ethics is the study of how one should think about correct behavior in the first place.
As you say, in the wider sphere of gaming, counting video games, "
the meta," with the definite article, refers to a very specific form of meta-game thinking. I.e. strategies which pursue success contingent on empirical (rather than theoretical) chances of success. But such thinking is merely one subset of the broader meaning of "meta-gaming."
The metagame or meta for short is the game beyond the mechanics of the game. It's looking at what the other players are doing and using that to influence your plans. It says that if most of your possible opponent's are going rock to be paper even if the paper options in theory have a lower DPS - but the advantage over rock counteracts that.
Metagaming is however a bit of a dirty word in RPG circles and the nearest thing most groups have to a meta is to turn up e.g. with waterbreathing and swim speeds in a pirate campaign.
Yeah, there's rather an antagonistic perception of meta-game thinking in general (not just pursuing "the meta") in TTRPGs, though I find that that antagonism is spotty and self-contradictory at times. E.g. people love to trot out examples of players who make presumptions about creatures and then get upset when their presumptions are intentionally defied. Yet there is (and has essentially always been) a style of play that expects exactly this, going back to the time of Gygax. E.g. if you know there will be trolls, it is not only correct to try to prepare for them as much as possible, it is a mark of being a
superior player that you know that both fire
and acid will do the trick. Even if your individual character has never fought trolls and never had any reason to know their weaknesses, you as a player know, and that's what matters. Hence why older editions discouraged players from reading the DMG and MM; to do so would confer a survival advantage without "earning" it through play. (Many people really underestimate just how much old-school D&D was committed to "it is a game, it should be played like a game, other considerations are secondary.")
