You got questioned and doubted because you firmly asserted some things which were directly contradictory to the text of the 1975 rules. And others which seemed to be retroactively-applied concepts from later editions. I would respectfully suggest that it's more accurate to say some folks would rather
read history, and trust the evidence of written text over fallible and mutable human memory five decades later. Memories and stories of the past can be great, and CAN provide useful insight, but they're not always accurate, or descriptive of anything but that individual's own table practices, rather than the author's intent.
We've discussed this, and I've talked with and listened to Tim (and Darrold Wagner, the original Thief author) at some length. I remember a session of Tim's I played in at TotalCon a decade or so ago when he was extolling the virtues of the novel-to-him idea of using individual d10s for initiative instead of d6s (like 2E had made standard decades before, but he had been out of the loop on D&D rules). Tim was a wonderful guy and a key person at TSR in the early days, but his recollection 40+ years later is not an airtight basis for an Argument from Authority. (He may have also been recalling how he functionally "fixed" the written Thief rules at his tables
after the fact, by deliberately choosing to not use the rules as written/percentages given in many cases).
And anyway, "thief skills were only for those tasks where it would be unlikely for a "normal" person to have a chance of succeeding at it" applies to most of the things Thieves are expected to do. There was no "Find Traps" skill until 1978, so we can infer that everyone was supposed to just to describe searches before that. Climbing in general when there's a rope or plentiful handholds? Sure, makes sense anyone can do it. Climbing "nearly sheer surfaces", as Greyhawk defined being a Thief ability in 1975, easy for a referee to say that's NOT a thing a normal person has a chance of success at.
