The last thing I care about is what square is character X standing in. After all, the space the action takes place in isn't actually gridded so why have the players obsessed over the area as if it were?
Exactly. I enjoyed using minis much more back when we played 2nd Ed, when they were merely colourful visual representations of the approximate positions of the characters, not surrogate chips on a wargaming board. Sadly, I recently played in a 4th Ed game where the DM refused to let us use miniatures, insisting instead on using counters, because it was easy to put buttons on them to indicate who was marked, etc. Sigh.
It's a sad malaise when the rules get in the way of the sense of wonder. I remember my dismay when I was dutifully 'informed' by a player in a short 3rd Ed game I was running that every magic effect had to be codified and, indeed, balanced. We had, for instance, to be able to tell how a magical effect impacted on, say, undead. It seemed like any magic item I created had to have a series of suffixs attached to it, like a list of degrees at the end of the name of some oxford scholar. But it wasn't about making the items more impressive. It was about pigeon holing them.
I don't want it to look like I am bashing the later editions btw; frankly, D&D has suffered from these sorts of issues all along. Consider the extensive monster manuals and long spell lists; in some ways they are virtues, but defining the world so extensively can have its problems. For instance, in the first post in this thread I mentioned that how the response of my players to the freaky roof climbing baby was to assume it was 'Spiderclimb'. I was hoping to elicit a sense of supernatural horror, but all the players seemed to witness was a spell effect. It brought home to me how 'unmagical' magic had become - in a world filled with magic, magic was no longer special. Ultimately the myriad list of spells had made the world a smaller place, where magic was all mapped out. It felt like there was no wildernesses left, no place on the chart where the only label was "here be dragons". The lack of frontiers was killing the sense of wonder.