Tony Vargas
Legend
Leadership is by no means restricted to giving orders that must be followed, indeed, even with the possession of authority to give such orders, leadership can still be entirely lacking.Yep - which runs headfirst into the problem of whether a PC should be in position of telling other PCs what to do and expecting them to do it; because that's exactly what a leader-of-warriors Warlord does: it gives orders that are to be followed.
So, it's been mentioned several times in this thread, already, but, no, that's not what a "leader" was, not in 4e, where it very specifically was called out in the description of the Role, that Leader did not require the character be 'party leader,' and not in concept.This is the crux of the issue with ANY leader-type class: regardless of its name its base function is to tell other PCs what to do.
The question I have for you, Lanefan, is why do you need it to mean something you dislike, rather than accepting the definitions the fans of the role & the concept actually use? What is the benefit you derive from willfully misinterpreting what others want out of the game?