As someone who wrote mini-games in MMOs and many other videogames, they're done for a reason, usually as a shortcut due to the game engine not being powerful enough to handle how it would really go down in reality, or having to expand the main engine to support that. I can tell you that a lot of gamers, for example, don't like when cutscenes are pre-rendered, since it breaks immersion, or when suddenly your controls change (or even worse, you lose player control entirely).
Unified mechanics are popular for a reason. Mini-games are often added to loading screens now, and are often a "no no" outside of that, at least in AAA titles. E.g. if you get into a vehicle in the game, do you want your camera stick to suddenly be different? No, it's jarring. How about the rate of fire of your gun, or the button used to press it. I think you'd agree, those would be bad things. Table-top RPGs are the same, if you can support most things using the same mechanic (say, a d20 dice rolling mechanic), that brings a ton of benefits. Of course we learned from 3.x that unification can also lead to very broken things (like skills being min-maxed and the die roll meaning little once your bonus gets to +40).
Wait...what? You mean one shouldn't roll a to-hit with your arrow? That's ...I don't know what to say.
Combat, you're right, has always had some element of mini-game feel to it, because everything is suddenly segmented into rounds. If your hypothetical chase scene isn't segmented into rounds but some other metric (I don't see how that's a design win or desirable, but anyway), I don't see why a single arrow should be easier or harder to aim or cause less or more damage because you're not "in combat" right now.
Combat "mini-game" is something we are used to, however, in AD&D your spell durations would last real minutes or rounds, real time, which is something everyone understands, and allows for versatile non-combat durations and applications of things. Putting things in strict buckets with no overlap causes huge immersion problems, where they did not exist before. And you certainly never had to use a different die rolling mechanic for shooting an arrow or a spell or a climb check or anything else. I call that, superior game design.
I agree, D&D has often been more about combat than the other pillars, but some editions' monopolized the game table time with combat, and others allowed combat to be fast and furious. Narratively speaking, it doesn't matter if you win a combat in 5 or 10 rounds, so long as the same people are dead at the end of it. Someone else brought this up, kudos to them...combat is a mini-game that should take as little time as possible away from the story, while being as fun as possible in that time. Next is already achieving that, in spades, I think they're on the right track. The article sounded great, they said a lot of the right things and seem to recognize that people don't want a plethora of mini-games with different die rolling mechanics in every context, every time. Making them optional, even during the same session, is a great innovation, that can allow people to skip by something with a quick check, or go into more detail when it suits them.
E.g. I personally don't want skill checks to work differently in combat or out of it, i.e. "skill challenges". Every group I played in detested them, and always wanted to skip to the next combat, since you'd virtually never trigger a power outside of combat. (due to the target limitations, the 5 minute max durations, the fact that all your other tricks and fiddly bits don't apply out of combat, e.g. "No action" triggers on rolling initiative).
I'd be even in favor of revising what initiative means, so that you could seamlessly zoom-in to combat and out and back in again without triggering all sorts of weird discontinuities that break immersion further. Just because combat is implemented as a mini-game, doesn't mean it can't be made better. Having it take less time away from the other pillars, and those pillars re-use as much of the same mechanics for resolution, greatly simplifies rules adjucation and makes the game, overall, better.
Viewed from checking off those criteria, IMO, 2e was the best edition, looking back. I remember tons of improvised stat checks and quickly decided outcomes, that made no one want to min-max only certain stats, no one would ignore out of combat utility, no one would just wander around trying to trigger fights because they were bored. Ok, a few did, but then we grew up. It seems when your character sheet is 8 pages of combat-only powers, that people wonder that 90% of the time spent is in combat. That's way higher proportion than 2e (and 3e was bad, but nowhere near as bad as 4e in that respect).
A Handful of quick skirmishes mixed in with decent exploration and RP time, allows you to have a much more balanced game play, where all classes can contribute in different ways without losing 90% of their class abilities, is IMO a good thing. I guess some gamers value balance in time spent in each pillar more and others value balance in DPR or combat efficiency over all else, and don't want class to matter in any pillar other than combat (since magic is so unfair)
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