Rather than tell us to work harder and be better at playing the game, I'd prefer them to design a better ruleset. If I have to put in a lot of effort to make the game fun, then that's not fun for me. Clearly, not everyone needs to put in that work for SCs and rituals and the like, but equally as clearly, some do, and for those that do, it's a problem.
Do you know how insanely complicated swinging a sword is? How many subtle and overt variations on angle, power, stamina, strength, skill, willpower, hope, fear, and confidence go into every single stroke? How could a system cover that vast range of possibilities?
Easy: The Attack Roll.
Point being: D&D has always been abstract to some degree. It's no harder to do this for a sword swing than it is to do it for a skilled manipulation of a conversation.
Now, go the other way. Imagine if combat was just "The party must make 5 successful attack rolls vs. AC of 14+level before you miss 3 times."
In fact, try that. Replace all your combats for a session with the above rule.
You're missing the point here. Combat is a single type of activity in which specific individuals take fairly specific roles and fairly specific things happen. It can be covered by a system with whatever varying levels of abstraction you want, but the goals are clear, the process is well understood, and it is always in many fundamental ways the same. You have attacks, defense, movement, injury, cover, flanking, vision, etc. These are all well understood and well known.
Now, tell me what the common factors are in a canoe race, surviving a landslide, disarming a bomb, negotiating a peace treaty, and outsmarting the god of thieves. I'm not suggesting there are no commonalities, but the commonalities are FAR more general and of a totally different character than the commonalities between swinging a sword, swinging a mace, shooting a bow, or casting a fireball. The former group of things involve completely different activities.
Now, why is the SC system so much more abstract than the combat system? This is because the commonalities are at a much higher level. Indeed at the level that my first list of things share elements in common they are just as much like combat as they are like each other. So a system like the SC system, to cover all of those things MUST be equally generalized and abstract. Indeed the SC system CAN cover combat since at the level of the SC system it is like the other situations.
So we now come back to my point. Please suggest a system which can cover the dynamics of snow sliding down a mountain at the same abstraction level as combat, AND cover a canoe race at the same level, AND cover the other situations on my list, all at the same level of abstraction as combat. Clearly you cannot. Nobody can. No such system can exist in any practical RPG. If I were making a game about Ski Patrol then it would make sense to create an avalanche module that was reasonably detailed. That game would probably lack a combat system, perhaps allowing for it at the sort of level of abstraction you mock above. It won't be a big issue in that system because it probably won't come up much.
If I were to complain to you that your Ski Patrol game had a sucky combat system your answer to me would pretty much amount to something like "well, play a different game" or "you'll have to do more of the work on making that fun yourself, it isn't the focus of this game." Those are perfectly legitimate and sensible responses, and they do not deserve an "Oberoni Fallacy" response nor an "Any Good Scottsman" response. They are just an acknowledgment of reality.
Now imagine that this is what people who aren't into combat-heavy D&D games have to sit through.
A good DM can still make it interesting. You might use the above rule and have a great time! In which case, you can give ME the $120 you would've spent on a PHB/DMG/MM, because I've given you all you ever need to play a good game of D&D with.
A good DM can make anything interesting. The rules don't make it interesting, though, and that's why I don't think they're very good rules when what you WANT, every time, is an interesting challenge.
Compared with the combat rules, which do succeed in giving an interesting challenge each time (though at a level of complexity that I'm not personally a fan of all the time), those are not good rules at all!
I am comparing them. The thing is YES many of those situations in D&D require more work or more finesse as a DM to pull off well. Again, the reason is D&D is a game that features combat and can thus afford to supply a very detailed combat system. The flaw in your reasoning here is in your assumption that there is some kind of category equivalence between "combat" and "everything that isn't combat" where there is some sort of equally deep rules treatment of "everything that isn't combat" when in fact it is itself 1000's of other categories EACH ONE OF WHICH has as much complexity as combat does.
Replace skills with something more akin to powers, where instead of a raw check, you get to say, "This Happens." Make skill checks more like attack rolls. Use defenses. Use economies. Have attrition. Have the challenge fight back. Have victories cost. Allow retreat. It's all very possible. It's been done well before. It's been done pretty well in 4e combat, even.
OK, but how many of these powers will I need? Combat has say 5 characters in it and each one has minimally around 10 types of actions they can take at any given point in the combat. How many of these will I need for each of my non-combat situations? Practically speaking combat options are what, 70% of your character? I am pretty skeptical that I can make equivalently detailed subsystems for other things, or the 2 page 4e character sheet could be Encyclopedia Brittanica!
At a deeper level there is another issue here, which is what are the proper dimensions of abstraction? In my canoe racing system what are the natural elements that I will model? Individual strokes of the paddle? What? It isn't exactly obvious. With combat this issue exists too, but nearly 100 years of war game development and 35 years of RPG development have given us some good answers. We lack equally good answers for other situations.
Given that the types of abstractions will be different and often not well known ahead of time for non-combat things it really isn't easy to build detailed systems for them. The SC system actually IS a pretty good answer. It is very abstract of course, but that's the price of generality.
Finally I'd like to point out that your example of combat isn't as comical as you think. There is a vast debate going on right now on the 4e community forums about exactly this, with one group of posters absolutely dedicated to the idea that D&D should shed its combat system entirely and replace it with an abstract SC-like 'theatre of the mind' or something, and the other basically saying "yeah, that ain't D&D, never was D&D, never will be D&D if we have anything to say about it." My point being that as much as you mock highly generalized systems and claim they lack drama and tension and whatnot there are plenty of people who disagree.
