Very true! On account of implications that I expect were made evident through my question's insouciance.
Yeah, I suspected there was some implicit tongue-in-cheek there.
A heuristic that I understand from diversity and inclusivity training at work, is that it has to be up to the injured party to decide if and how they are injured. The other party has every reason to claim that no injury is being done. They have no personally-felt motive to desist as they are not directly subject to the harm. The doing of the injury may even rely on acts or views that suit them quite well. If the injured party are a minority, they often cannot rely on norms to help them (existing norms will often best support continuation of the harms.)
Which is fair, though "minority" becomes rather a more complex subject in the context of game analysis. Are ultra-old-school "High Gygaxian" heist-lovers the (a?) minority party because their style has mostly been abandoned by official D&D and tends to only get support in comparatively niche 3PP stuff? Are 4e fans the (a?) minority party because our favorite edition is so often straight-up falsely accused or totally forgotten? Are
3e fans the (a?) minority party because everyone moved on to 5e, leaving behind the few distinctive bits of 3e design? If more than one is a minority party, what happens when one uses a term another finds pejorative, do we listen to the minority struggling to get its voice heard even if that means allowing speech another minority finds mocking, or do we expect them to meet some kind of norm and thus in principle silence their voice?
(I don't think these questions have clear answers. Just noting the heuristic can quickly run into trouble when one minority group's concerns conflict with another's.)
Perhaps it's worth considering what is at stake, which is fruitful conversation. I believe the gains made by giving the offended party the opportunity to put forward labels that are neutral - even though as you say that can't be done as a simple fiat - are worth giving ground for. If giving ground seems to have a cost, then perhaps as I say there really is a burden on the other side to articulate that cost, rather than rely on the label to do that work.
Sure, it's best that we strive for an improvement. And, as you say, addressing what is lost and why, and whether that loss actually matters, is relevant. Sometimes the loss is simply evocativeness, which is a pretty weak standard. Sometimes it is like my example of "meatgrinder" above, where to take away the (relatively soft) implication of arbitrary mass slaughter would literally strip out the key thing being described about early-edition D&D (that it has high body counts,
especially with the many inexperienced DMs of the day, and that most of those deaths were unavoidable, random, and empty/unsatisfactory/etc.)
By that same token, though, we can easily run into trouble in other ways. Consider, for example, if we discuss with person A, who finds label Q unacceptable because of its connotations, but supports label P. Then, later, we discuss with person B....who finds label P unacceptable because of its connotations, but supports label Q. We are definitionally stuck: we cannot use Q without angering A, who wants P; but we cannot use P without angering B, who wants Q. What are we to do? We cannot dispute either person, because they are each aggrieved parties and aggrieved parties are always right. Yet it is logically impossible to appease both without inventing new terms--and that just passes the buck. For the sake of being able to communicate without needing constant circumlocution, it would seem that we probably
at some point have to consider the practical angle in addition to the need to show respect.
