I believe I implied that they all are - the later Neolithic. Working on agriculture, haven't gotten bronze right? So, they've skipped from flaking scrapers off flint cores to conspicuous consumption? I'm sorry, I don't think my metaphor can take that.
Seriously, though, even a paleolithic tool culture /did/ include design (intent, pre-visualiztion).
Nod, and, IMX (and I've introduced tons of people to D&D over 39 years), they have, yes, and not always the same thing, it varies with player. For instance, Vancian magic lost of no end of players back in the day, and led to myriad alternate 'mana' systems, because it was so unintuitive and counter-genre. But, in the intervening decades, D&D Vancian has bled through video games and D&D-themed and D&D-inspired fiction and into the mainstream consciousness... and D&D has softened Vancian, a lot, with 'prep' replacing 'memorization,' now, with 5e, Spontaneous Casting for all. (And, yes, that's an example of a change, and one that's well-received by new players, all unknowing that in the past they've had to've picked not only which spells they wanted to cast that days, but how many times they were going to be able to cast each of them.)
But, very often, especially with older eds of D&D, new players show up once, voice no particular complaint even seem interested & to have a good time, and are then never seen again. Just "see'n what all the fuss is about" I guess. At my FLGS, we actually /do/ see more turnover and more one-time players, now, under AL then we did with Encounters, but we also see /so many more new players/ (and returning players, the first couple years of 5e) that we've easily retained just as many past that critical-seeming first session.
I've never seen a new-to-RPGs payer turned off by the use of a grid - returning players, OTOH... nope, also not really an issue. Every table at our FLGs still uses a battlemat. (OK, every /D&D/ table, the one non-D&D table, playing Rolemaster, of all things, didn't.)
I remember when, on the old 3e WotC boards, pre-Gleemax, grognards started grousing about 'grid dependence' like they didn't play at sandtables back in the day. And since then it's taken on a bizarre life of it's own.
I mean, TotM is great, but it is, IMHO/X, an 'advanced' technique - you don't want to give new & casual players the added overhead of trying to visualize range/area/positioning in a turn-based game, so TotM with them turns into the DM describing, re-describing, and re-re-describing the same, slightly different scene, each and every turn. A play surface (grid or plain) and some sort of figures really helps new players.
You'd just see "grid dependence" replaced with "VTT dependence," and more emphasis on "it's an MMO" over "it's a tactical boardgame." That's the thing about stalking horses, you can use whatever color horse is available.
Enough people took the things they disliked personally enough to edition war over them. A nice/efficient on-line venue to play the game wouldn't've in any way mollified them, if anything, it'd've made them more determined.
'Suspending reality' or "immersion" is a very personal experience. For me, I get there more easily if I'm /less/ comfortable/familiar with the system, it gives me a sense of feeling out and exploring like the character is. I get the sense I'm an outlier, it seems most folks achieve immersion more readily when they're fully conversant with the system - it becomes second-nature, and becomes the 'nature' (natural laws) of the imagined setting. ::shrug:: Either way, if you hate* the system, it's not going to deliver that sort of experience, you'll constantly be reacting to the system, itself, instead of the fiction its modeling.
*or, conversely, if you're really into the system for it's own sake.
