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It is at least a start. Better than nothing.

My gawds you may have just caught the DMG in the act of having an option. Clearly it is a book that must be burned. In the interest of clarity I will state that second sentence is sarcasm and I hope no one will take it literally.

Running your game with monotheistic religion is a choice I agree. I think there can be discussion of how that changes the presumptions of the game without imparting any judgment for or against it or implying DMs should or shouldn't do it.

From what I can tell the default assumptions are for the DM to have all the details worked out for the entire cosmology before play. Or I suppose to use the default cosmology. I think the cosmology is a thing to worry about if and when it becomes relevant and otherwise not at all.

Apparently I overdid the sarcasm. No worries.

You want specifics. I said it before and I said it again and I'll say it one more time. I want the book to be laid out and organized so actual people can actually read and use it. An actual functional index would be revelatory. I want a basic explanation of what people usually expect from the...

Some things the best way to learn them is by doing. If you screw up while GMing the odds are really good no one gets hurt. There are games that have books that work as resources for a new GM but D&D is not one of those games. If you can play with a decent GM before you try to do it you're...

There aren't enough pros and cons. There is one pro and one con and they're practically meaningless. There is no help here for someone new to the game trying to figure things out. Are we playing a dungeoncrawl? What approaches to handling dice work best for that? What about a hexcrawl? What...

Still seems more like platitudes than anything else to me. How is play at a table where the DM almost never calls for rolls different from one where the DM almost always call for rolls? How would a DM know where in this particular range they wanted to be? How constrained do we mean "anything is...

It's a start if a bit of a half-assed one. Why would a DM choose to run the game this way? What types of games does it best support? What types of games does it not support well?

What is motivating me is a desire for new DMs to get actual guidance from the Dungeon Master's Guide to help them run the games they want to run. What about that is motivating you to argue so vociferously against it?

How about actual guidance? There are platitudes but no actual guidance. How about actual descriptions about how actually using the dice actually changes the way actual people actually play? I'm not suggesting the DMG should specify One True Way to play the game. I'm saying it should help DMs...

I've found you can get very different play experiences with the same people at the table by playing different games or by changing up some rules. Which is not to say the people don't matter. The game and the rules matter too.

What I'm advocating for is making if very clear that if you want to run a game a specific way you do these things. Or that if you do these specific things the game will run like so. There really is not adequate actual guidance of this sort in the 5e DMG.

There's not much actual guidance there but since it's only like a column of text there's really not much room is there? And I read that specific column of text before mentioning it. Did you perhaps think it was some random whim?

Cool. I must have missed the part in the DMG where it gives actual guidance about deciding how much to rely on the dice while running a game. How would someone new to DMing figure that out from reading the the putative guide?

I can quote myself too.

I apologize. That was unwarranted. There is very little I would call "guidance" in the 5e DMG. What there is is a lot of optional rules and approaches with nothing to help a DM understand why to use them.

How can it provide guidance if no one reads it?

How is saying the DMG shouldn't be a guide or at least include guidance for new DMs not prescriptive? It seems reasonable for someone to look at the word "guide" in the title and at least expect some guidance. It also seems silly to expect someone to learn to DM by DMing the Starter Set which...