... what would that say to you, if anything? Would you see it as a positive or negative?
I would take it as a qualified positive.
"Positive" because I, like you, generally like "crunch". I prefer the rules to the game to be explicit and shared (via written rules) among all the participants, and I think that the alternative is actually
not "few or no rules" but "rules that are the limited province of one or a few people, known only to them and imposed by them on everyone".
"Qualified" because I think that many "crunchy" rule sets falter in not adhering to two critical principles:
- There should be exactly as much crunch as required; not one jot less,
and not one jot more. Crunch for crunch's sake is a bad thing. This is, of course, a matter of judgement... tricky!
- A crunchy system should form a whole that is consistent within itself. If it describes a world, the world it is supposed to describe should not be at odds with the crunch of the system. If, for example, there is one obviously superior way to do things, then (almost) everyone in the world should do things that way, not some other way "just because".
Subject to these being followed, I think a "crunch renaissance" could actually be a fine thing.