delericho
Legend
There's a lot of truth in this. People can't bear to give the other side an inch, which means that when their favoured producer puts out a sucky product they still feel the need to laud it to the high heavens - often with some form of "if you don't like it, you clearly don't understand it argument".The problem with RPG discussion isn't RPG theory at all. It's about general devolution through social media into a positions over interest culture. Folks want to win, they want to be right, and they want these things above a good discussion. It is also accentuated by gamers propensity for being anal retentive and overly pedantic.
Or, less often, the opposite - when the other side has a hit, they need to find some spurious grounds to tear it down. (That one is less common simply due to exposure - once you've checked out of 5e/PF/whatever you're unlikely to see the 'hit'.)
Another fundamental issue is the competing demands of relevance vs depth - most RPG materials can only really be properly judged based on actual use, but actual use takes time. Meanwhile, for a review to be of any great interest, it needs to come out close to the release of the product. Which means, unless you happen to get very early access, the best the reviewer can afford to do is a review based on a read-through. (And many reviews don't even seem to manage that.)
And, of course, there's the biggest fundamental issue of all: there's no consensus on what constitutes a good RPG adventure/setting/system anyway. What I'm looking for is almost certainly not what you're looking for. So the best we can probably hope for is to find a reviewer that we mostly agree with, and trust them for recommendations.