Minimalism is pragmatic. Don’t make things more complicated than they need to be. You can hold all the rules of a minimalist game in your head and run it without stopping play to look up some obscure edge case.
I do agree about RPGs being games first though. If the gameplay isn’t fun or thematic, change it or drop it. If you don’t know what the game is about, you can’t designing around that theme. If you have bits of your game that don’t serve the theme, they should be cut. If you’re making a monster-fighting game, anything that’s not about fighting monsters is superfluous.
It can be pragmatic, but only if you're not feeding back a particular mechanic into the rest. If you come up with some involved Flight rules but then don't actually give those rules to any content, then yeah, whatever Flight rules are in place should be minimized if not cut.
Whereas say, in a game where multiple kinds of characters, technically all types, could potentially end up interacting with the rules, from your Pegasus riding Paladins to your Aarakocras to your Dragon Riders and anything inbetween or beyond, then you need to ensure your Flight rules are actually robust enough to support them.
In a roundabout way, theres a general method to game design of designing rules based around what keeps coming up at the table. The reason something might keep coming up at the table is often just as driven by the content you put in the game (your Aarakocras and Dragon Riders) as it is by other factors, like having tactical combat or being a particular genre or whatever.
So knowing that, you can work backwards, designing the mechanic and then populating the game with things that build off of or otherwise integrate with the mechanic.
That was something I even did recently; I found it desirable to do Durability, and that lead to me designing a wholly new take on the Barbarian, that I wouldn't have been able to think of independently. I might have arrived at a Barbarian that revolves around breaking things constantly and ripping off the armor and body parts of their enemies to use as weapons, but its not likely I would have in turn thought to use Durability as an enabling mechanic; i might have instead came up with some bespoke parallel system complicating the class and not really adding to the rest of the game.
And this whole thing is the entire aim of what Ive been plugging away at for the past week in finally codifying all of my thoughts on Exploration into an actual system; so that I can then look at the Ranger and deliver one that'll nail not just the archtype itself but the promise of it in the greater meta sense.
