I largely disagree with your conclusion. Disengaged D&D players ARE a failure mode. The game is doomed in that case unless those players leave or become engaged. Dungeon World OTOH at least naturally requires them to do something. Sure, maybe they will just implode, but the vast majority of people who are at the table, want to play. They just need to figure out how. DW is very straightforward, any person who can read and write is fully qualified to play. Not that I think it's super hard to play classic games either, but they can take some initiative on the player's part.
I agree that disengaged D&D players are not good, what I am arguing is that one thing the central narrative authority (i.e. DM) offers is that you only have to care about your character and not about the larger world-building and narrative to play. Because DMing is work, and not everyone wants to do it. My spouse, for example, very much enjoys our D&D sessions, but has flat out said many times that they have no interest in every running a game.
A game like
Fiasco requires, IMO, more dedicated players. It's not hard to play conceptually at all, much easier than D&D, but it requires more willingness to take on that storytelling role. I think DW plays a lot like
Monsterhearts, yeah? So, again, not hard to learn but I think requires more commitment to play. What am I saying? I'm having trouble expressing my core idea, which is basically that D&D can be fun with players who are into being story passengers. That's not the same as being disengaged.
@loverdrive I find the first example (
Counterstrike) interesting because it is a video game, so it has to be tightly constrained - every option has to be programmed into the structure of the game. This is due to the limitations that the medium imposes. It seems to me that this is more analogous to a hyper-detailed boardgame. Everything you can do is determined by hard-coded rules.
But isn't the central difference between that and a TTRPG that the play space is the player's imaginations, which are (for all practical purposes) infinitely vaster? So no set of hard rules can cover every eventuality, especially when you start factoring magic and everything else. This is the main attraction of the TTRPG, isn't it - that it takes advantage of that immense play space?
One way around this is to keep the rules so basic that everything becomes storytelling and interpretation.
Fiasco just has rules for story prompts but everything else is storytelling.
Monsterhearts has rules that are slightly tighter, and you still make dice rolls, but still is mostly driven by narration. I like these games, but they are light on what
@Snarf Zagyg has elsewhere called "crunchy gaminess."
Your criticism of D&D - that if it works it's because of a good DM - seems to me to be true of every TTRPG. Some of them focus more distributing the DM's job amongst the players, and I am personally finding that more enjoyable, thus this thread. I am experimenting with different ways to bring that structure into D&D. But there also seems to be an attraction to giving players quite a few rules to work their busy brains on. In
Fiasco, problems are easily solved - you just say what happens and it happens. The challenge is in coming up with something fun and interesting that sparks the next person to build on the story. But games like D&D do a good job of allowing for storytelling space while also giving players more prescriptive (i.e. rules-governed) situations to solve.
I guess you absolutely
should give most credit to the DM when you have a great D&D game, or any other TTRPG experience that has a referee. Isn't that just generally true? Aren't the games intentionally designed so the the quality of the game is largely up to the referees and players? Why is that bad design?
Edit: One thing that I want to continually re-emphasize is that my opinions on what is good or bad are just my opinions, and not meant as a criticism of what other people like or don't like. Personally, I have enjoyed just about every TTRPG that I have tried. I have some attachment to the D&D brand for nostalgia reasons, but mostly I play it a lot because of convenience and popularity.
Dread is probably my favourite and I think the design is absolutely brilliant, but it just scratches me where I itch, so YVMV.
if it didn't make me want to 
. At least you also got a detailed, robust set of games rules with the descriptors?
