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Exactly. I'm reading a book at the moment - an enjoyable story so far other than that the amount of contrivance, where the protagonists arrive at just the right place at the right time for something to happen, is already becoming very annoying.

Revitalize?

I've taken the liberty of adding numbers to your list below, to make it easier to speak to specific points without having to retype or paraphrase each one. Points 1 through 4 - bang on. Point 5 - game mechanics and abstractions are often more a "necessary evil", play can't functionally happen...

If that's the case - that the D&D system itself isn't doing any simulating and is instead getting out of the way so the DM and players can do the simulating themselves such that the players feel like they're acting in a real place - doesn't that in fact make it a very good system for simulation?

Which is a glaring error of omission in the blog's scene-set. Time of day (or night) makes a pretty big difference to almost everything about the scene, from likelihood of people being awake/alert in the house to ease of a passerby observing the lockpicker to etc. etc.; thus rendering...

Well, unarmoured Elves and Hobbits are stealthy. Rangers are more observant. Never mind Monks, who use an entirely different surprise mechanic bespoke to the class. I thought the same. Then again, 5e "surprise" mechanics are a bit of a jumble anyway; as if the system almost wants to do away...

Maybe; but in fairness my in-the-moment example didn't go that far back. But unless the area is known to be almost dead flat, an occasional low ridge or valley would seem reasonable.

Someone has to write a song now: "The Lone Wolf of Quantum Ridge".

From the perspective of the abstracted gameplay, however, it doesn't matter if you dodged the swing completely and took no damage or blocked the swing with your shield and took no damage. Now, one could argue that these two outcomes should be mechanically different; that the shield itself, for...

Sure they have - they've simulated the feeling-out process where combatants size each other up and see what the other is made of, and now they're about to get to the part where each significant blow really hurts or even kills outright. Even more so in a 4e paradigm where your example puts...

Exactly - the presence/absence of a cook is unrelated to the success/fail of the door being opened. I would. Absent other pre-narrated considerations, "nothing happens" would be by far the most likely. :)

They'd meet fewer potential encounters (i.e. less rolls) per day, but the trip would take a lot longer because all that searching for tracks and detouring around waterholes slows them down.

Easy to just make DR cumulative per round, so if you've got DR 5 and take 12 points damage in a round you still take 7 whether it all came in one hit or from 12 different applications of 1 point each.

Braunstein required a fair bit of prep and intro from the GM to get things going, but (when I played it, anyway, with Wesely as GM) once play began the GM pretty much just sat there and did nothing the whole time other than watch. Afterwards, he gave a five-minute rundown of what we'd done...

Depends on what it's being used for. Roll-under intelligence to remember something obscure really is subjective to the PC as the root task is the same for everyone, thus roll-under works well for this. I use it all the time. Roll-under dexterity to pick a lock doesn't work nearly as well, as...

I misread the last bit as "...magically mind-altering grass", which might make the odds of being ambushed somewhat higher. :)

In fairness, though, there really should be two rolls here (though by design there's only one) - one to determine the success of the pocket-pick and another to determine whether anyone noticed it whether successful or not; because these things are largely independent of each other. There's four...

If the dice come up "encounter" then there's an encounter; the party's stealth then has a lot to say about the course that encounter takes and-or whether it is completely bypassed. DM: <on rolling a random encounter> "On your quiet way through the forest you notice a Dire Wolf not far ahead, on...

I think for trad it's often more like: --- player succeeds a lock picking check --- DM checkes notes for the kitchen and its occupants, sees there's a cook there at this time of day, then determines how (or if) the cook reacts.

Far more fun would be a tarrasque made of ice cream. I mean, if you're gonna go gonzo, why stop at half-measure? :)