You're not helping the game along with looking up spells, rules, whatever it takes to help keep the DM on track. You're taking advantage of him and the gaps in his knowledge, ability, and judgment.
It's normally these DMs that don't like the rules quoted to them. They've read the rules(or so they say, most of the time they haven't, or at least they don't remember them), they don't want the rules quoted to them, they want you to do what they say.
Besides, most of the time the incidents in question weren't involving the rules at all. How fast does fire spread? I don't believe there are rules for that in any edition of D&D(and it probably depends on a lot of factors). So, any ruling the DM comes up with is going to be entirely from his own head, his own judgment. That particular example comes up because we had a DM(James) who believed that a single spark could light up a wooden house and burn the entire place to the ground in less than 5 minutes. And any fire would immediately light any flammables in its area without any roll. So if you used a burning hands spells in his 2e game, you could expect that the wooden floor would catch on fire and you'd be taking damage due to the heat of being in a "burning building" within a round or two later. It would also burn up all the loot in the building and likely result in the death of someone innocent who happened to be in the building that we didn't know about.
Contrast that to the rest of our nearly 13 DMs who never once had a fire spell set anything on fire, all of whom felt that the spells were too instantaneous to set things on fire. The rules, however, were silent on whether simply casting these spells would set things on fire.
The first time he ruled that way we tried to say, "I think those spells shouldn't set things on fire. And when they do, it can take a long time for a small fire to turn into a big one. Certainly long enough for us to finish the fight and get out of there before we start taking damage." However, he disagreed and said he was the DM and what he said went.
We just learned quickly that it was better to prepare non-fire spells in James' game to avoid all the difficulties that came with setting everything on fire all the time. We also learned if we want to destroy evidence, we can set a building on fire and it'll burn so quickly no one can stop it and destroy everything in it. When the laws of physics are different than you expect them to, you adjust to the new laws of physics, that's all.
Likewise, when we didn't use battlemaps and the DM expected us to keep track of the positions of everyone in our head and we said "I cast a fireball behind the far Orcs", one DM would say "Are you sure? You know those far Orcs are in melee with 2 of your party members, right?" and one DM would say "Alright, that hits 3 Orcs and 2 of your party members, roll for damage. No, you can't take it back, if you can't keep track of where your party members are, then I'm not going to tell you. Assume it's the confusion of battle that makes it difficult to remember where they all are."
You learned quickly to avoid area of effect damage in the second DMs game, because you often hit your own party members without wanting to.
Your trust in a game master seems to be in his or her competence with the rules set and judgment. To earn my trust as a player, you need to find non-cynical ways to cope with any lack of competence or judgment. The way you phrased your post, it sounds like your response is rather cynical.
It is a little cynical, I admit. That's due to the pure number of misunderstandings I've had from DMs. You never really know if you are going to try jumping over a 3 foot hole and have a DM tell you "No one can jump 3 feet, at least not without a running start. You fall in the hole to your death." People, in general, get weird notions in their heads and no one can convince them that they are wrong. It's a lot easier to say "Look, it says in the book that I can jump 5 feet without a running start if I make a DC 10 Athletics check" than trying to convince a DM that 3 feet isn't that big of a deal to jump when he is convinced it's an impossible distance.
I trust that given free reign nearly any DM will eventually come up with their own brand of "insanity". I don't even trust myself with complete free reign. I keep my players trust by following the rules as written as consistently as possible. They know that 95% of what they do in the game will be decided by the rules and I'm not going to change it on them on the fly. They know the capabilities of their character and its limitations. This allows them to more accurately use tactics in combat with a good sense of their chances of success.
