(btw, if I wanted to call anyone out for how they approach discussions, it would be posters who are either moderated often in these conversations or who have been outright banned).
Going to start with this.
The reason why I consider what you wrote a "call out" is because, whether you intended it or not, you are doing exactly what this thread is doing (and what it has done in the past...because this is like the 50 bajillionth iteration of it...and its why I called it exactly what it, and every iteration of it, is "a dog whistle of an inquisition"). You're effectively charging me with some kind of ethics violation. Like I'm responsible for "unhealthy conversation" and, by extension, the environment that unhealthy conversations persist in.
I not only don't agree with this assessment, I protest that assessment (and the assessment of the dog whistle of an inquisition that is this thread...and every one like it) in the deepest way possible.
I'm not quite getting at why these three points are of particular emphasis, but I suppose they all speak to the value of experience and expertise. Absolutely, more experience provides a different perspective. But if you start a conversation with the premise that there are only 5 or so participants who have enough experience (and the right kind of experience) to say something meaningful...well then, you end up with a conversation with only five participants, plus a bunch of people alienated by this conversation. I also don't think this perspective is inherently more valuable; indeed, some of the most interesting and enlightening comments about role playing games have come from absolute "beginners" (or, perhaps, at least those capable of having a "beginners mind.").
I put them together because they each mean different but related things:
* Within D&D rules-texts, there are varying levels of intricacy, complexity, structure (vs freeform), and
necessity-of-understanding-and-following-with-impunity (lest things go awry/become unwieldy) when it comes to the advice/procedures etc.
* When it comes to games across the spectrum, there are varying levels of intricacy, complexity, structure (vs freeform),
necessity-of-understanding-and-following-with-impunity (lest things go awry/become unwieldy) when it comes to the advice/procedures etc.
* Games that feature more structure vs more freeform, more intricacy and complexity vs less of both, more interlocking/integration/systematization vs more discretized/"opt-in toolkittery"/GM mediation or ruling are different beasts when it comes to both (a) the cognitive space they should persist in at large (eg, its clearly more difficult to on-ramp players of one type vs the other) and (b) the nature of the cognitive space participants at the table assume (this is not a value judgement..."nature" here is constitutive only of the quality of being rather different/drawing a stark contrast).
* At the population level (yes, there are idiosyncratic individuals who get worse the more they do something), people tend to improve from "First Exposure to Totally New Thing" to Practice/Session # 4 to Practice/Session # 40.
* People who have exposure to disciplines that have technical &/or conditioning overlap (eg gymnasts who take up climbing) will have the proverbial "leg up". They'll be able to transfer that exposure, draw from that technical expertise overlap, rely upon that mental/physical conditioning substrate shared between both to have an intrinsic understanding/capability that advantages them.
Easy personal anecdote: I took up climbing 3.33 years ago. I was not a gymnast in my youth. Gymnast translates at a ridiculous rate both cognitively and physically (for a number of reasons). However, I am an athlete broadly, I'm well-conditioned, and I've been a Brazilian Jiujitsu practitioner for 2.5 decades so I have a lot to draw upon. Regardless, a gymnast (of similar athletic profile and various physical indices) going straight to climbing will fundamentally have a "leg up" on me. They will be better than me immediately...and not by a little. Further, unless I do something extra to bridge that gap between us, it will persist and they will always be better than me.
In no way do I feel that there are a small number of participants who have something meaningful to say about games. All kinds of people have meaningful and interesting things to say. I spent the last week or so in an extremely interesting, and polite, disagreement (that disagreement persists) with someone I had never interacted before on here. They brought up a concept I had never heard of "Parasitic Game Design" and I thought it was an extremely interesting subject generally and the limits of its application specifically.
Despite our disagreements (and one of those disagreements is my assessment of their understanding of a certain sort of systemization in TTRPGs), what they had to say was absolutely meaningful and compelling (to me personally and I certainly draw the conclusion that it propelled meaningful downstream conversation).
But that doesn't happen often enough. My involvement historically in these conversations has been to attempt to offer polite course correction when I read something that is rather askew or outright, demonstrably, not correct. My course correction is likely to be more stern when that "not correct" is coming from a partisan source who is (a) clearly ideologically opposed to the thing they're saying something wrong about and especially (b) if this is the 2nd or 3rd go-around on the same subject (I give you The Edition Wars).
