If I may, what is this big loss? XP has always come across as an awful lot of bookkeeping in any game I've played in, old-school or not. That's part of why "milestone" levelling has become so popular. (And, note, "milestone" doesn't have to mean "everything is on rails, you get XP when you reach the next station"--you could just as easily award progress based on the hexes players have travelled through, with more dangerous hexes counting as greater rewards, e.g. it takes 6 easy hexes, 3 medium hexes, or 2 hard hexes to level up.) I'm genuinely curious what the benefit is that justifies the bean-counting--especially since bean-counting is one of the things a lot of old-school players dislike about contemporary game design.
Sure, but it naturally arises from two things that, I believe, you would consider to be good things. If you do, then you may wish to reflect on what implications that has. Specifically, those two things were:
1. Magic items are purely optional and never need to appear in any game, ever, period, end of discussion, and
2. Players should not think "with their character sheet" (an annoying and dismissive insult, but it's the argument people make), but instead with their environment
The natural consequence of these two game design goals is that players collect a vast amount of treasure with jack squat to spend it on. People cheered at the removal of "magic item marts", but that's by far the most compelling thing for PCs to spend their money on, because...y'know...magic items are cool as hell, AND they make you better at Not Dying while on adventures. And the second-most-valuable thing for them to spend money on is...things they can put on their character sheets, like training, mundane tools/equipment, and property.
(I know nothing of 5.5e's "Bastions" so I cannot comment on whether they address this issue or not...but I suspect they do not.)
Not really a meaningful rebuttal when the poster in question already said they find weapon-breakage dull and annoying rather than exciting and tension-raising. And, I fear, that's how a lot of people view it. A broken weapon isn't a looming threat to fear, it's annoying tedium that solely exists to take away your fun and force you to suffer dull, boring stuff simply because, statistically speaking, 1/120 events happen 1/120th of the time on average and you make a hell of a lot more than 120 attack rolls in a character's lifetime. (As in, a Fighter in 5e ought to be making that many attack rolls, bare minimum, per level.)
And, again, these consequences? Most people don't find these exciting. They don't feel a thrill every time they risk potentially hurting a friend. They just feel frustrated and annoyed when The Dice Spirits decide that, today, instead of being a competent warrior who fights with cleverness and quickness and mighty thews, they're an incompetent rube who can't manage to stick the pointy end in the right gorram target! And this belief is reasonable. If an actual fencer (whether competitive or actual blood sport) injured herself 1/120 times she made a flèche, she would not be considered a competent fencer--and would almost surely go into significant training and practice to eliminate such a ridiculously high rate of stupid, dangerous consequences.
The problem--I think!--is that you see adventurers as being...not exactly "incompetent", but prone to failure, and because they are adventurers, when they fail, they fail spectacularly. That's not how most players today see the game; they see adventurers as competent in their core area of expertise (e.g. Fighters in melee combat, spellcasters with spellcasting, Rangers with tracking and wilderness survival, etc.), and reasonably capable even in other areas. As a result, even a failure rate of 1/120 is fantastically too high, especially when the consequences of that failure are severely harmful to one's own PC or one's allies.
Conversely: Most players today would see that first consequence as "HA! HA! I stole your cool weapon, and now you have NOTHING!" It isn't fun or exciting or thrilling or dread-inducing, it's just frustration, pure and simple, and they just...don't want to deal with that. That is, most people do want to feel they are legitimately challenged, but "the dice said you threw your sword in the ocean and now it's just Gone Forever" doesn't feel like a legitimate challenge. It feels like Random Bull$#!†. There's no legitimate challenge in Random Bull$#!†, it's just a frustrating thing that happens to you out of the blue and which you genuinely can't do anything, at all, about. And, to be clear, that doesn't mean failure can't happen, it totally can! But when the failure is a purely random bolt from the blue, rather than an actual bad choice on the player's part, it doesn't feel like failure. It feels like a capricious jerk is messing with you.
IMO, it's a strong argument for "why the hell would someone sleep through a battle on a ship that they absolutely should hear???"
Okay. You should understand that a lot of people, when they see that sort of thing, decide it isn't worth it to bother. It's just annoying tedium for an inevitable result. When failure is genuinely inevitable, most people disengage. Just because you don't, doesn't mean things should be designed in such a way that absolutely everyone MUST go through all the motions even when they are obviously and inevitably 100% pointless.
Unfortunately, this really isn't true for a lot of groups, and when time is precious (as it so often is!), it's wise to try to make the most of it that you can. Having lost my father a little while back, I am more keenly aware than ever that...yeah, it really is the case that you should make the most of what time you have.
