I don't really understand your reference to "replacing DMing". But on mechanics I have a strong view: different mechanics definitely suit different approaches to play.
Here are three examples, all relevant to 4e:
Healing
In many fantasy RPGs, including D&D, fighting, and therefore healing, is a recurrent element in action resolution. The more that a system mandates keeping close track of time outside of the resolution of an encounter, in order to determine the consequences of injury and the healing of it, the harder it makes it to run a scene-framing game. This is because those system imperatives distract attention at the table away from the emotional and tactical challenges of the scenes, towards and onto the minutiae of who is bandaging whose wounds with what, and how long that takes, and whether the Heal roll is a success, etc.
This has never been as big an issue in D&D, with its hit point system, as in games like Runequest and Rolemaster. But 4e, with its short rest mechanic, makes it a complete non-issue.
Effect durations
This is similar to the point about healing. When effect durations are measure in units like 1 minute per level or 10 mintues per level (very common in pre-4e versions of D&D) then adjudicating those effects requires careful tracking of time, especially but not only by the GM. Which takes the focus of play off the scenes, and onto the transition periods between scenes. Which elevates exploration over engaging scenes as an aspect of play.
4e has very few durations like this (maybe some rituals?).
Detection spells
The detection spell - Detect Evil, Detect Magic, ESP, Locate Object - is a big part of classic dungeon-crawling D&D play. As well as spells, some classes have detection abilities, and they are also common properties of intelligent swords.
As Lewis Pulsipher in particular emphasised in some of his early White Dwarf articles, if the GM is to be fair to players who have access to these spells then the GM has to map out, in advance, those areas of the dungeon that the PCs might explore by use of them. So then the cautious player whose PC detects first gets the benefit of that; and the rash player whose PC just blunders in gets the consequences of his/her rashness.
That level of preparation is pretty much the opposite of a scene-framing approach, which is all about placing and modulating challenges and rewards in resopnse to the ongoing dynamics of play, rather than laying it all out in advance.
4e is the first version of D&D to basically have no detection magic of this sort. (There is the Arcana skill for detecing magic through barriers, but because it's a skill check that doesn't involve resource consumption, the GM can treat it as a trigger to make something up without ripping off the player.)
In many fantasy RPGs, including D&D, fighting, and therefore healing, is a recurrent element in action resolution. The more that a system mandates keeping close track of time outside of the resolution of an encounter, in order to determine the consequences of injury and the healing of it, the harder it makes it to run a scene-framing game. This is because those system imperatives distract attention at the table away from the emotional and tactical challenges of the scenes, towards and onto the minutiae of who is bandaging whose wounds with what, and how long that takes, and whether the Heal roll is a success, etc.
This has never been as big an issue in D&D, with its hit point system, as in games like Runequest and Rolemaster. But 4e, with its short rest mechanic, makes it a complete non-issue.
Effect durations
This is similar to the point about healing. When effect durations are measure in units like 1 minute per level or 10 mintues per level (very common in pre-4e versions of D&D) then adjudicating those effects requires careful tracking of time, especially but not only by the GM. Which takes the focus of play off the scenes, and onto the transition periods between scenes. Which elevates exploration over engaging scenes as an aspect of play.
4e has very few durations like this (maybe some rituals?).
Detection spells
The detection spell - Detect Evil, Detect Magic, ESP, Locate Object - is a big part of classic dungeon-crawling D&D play. As well as spells, some classes have detection abilities, and they are also common properties of intelligent swords.
As Lewis Pulsipher in particular emphasised in some of his early White Dwarf articles, if the GM is to be fair to players who have access to these spells then the GM has to map out, in advance, those areas of the dungeon that the PCs might explore by use of them. So then the cautious player whose PC detects first gets the benefit of that; and the rash player whose PC just blunders in gets the consequences of his/her rashness.
That level of preparation is pretty much the opposite of a scene-framing approach, which is all about placing and modulating challenges and rewards in resopnse to the ongoing dynamics of play, rather than laying it all out in advance.
4e is the first version of D&D to basically have no detection magic of this sort. (There is the Arcana skill for detecing magic through barriers, but because it's a skill check that doesn't involve resource consumption, the GM can treat it as a trigger to make something up without ripping off the player.)
Here is a different example, that (for me, at least, based on my experiences) captures a key difference between Rolemaster and Runequest:
Both Rolemaster and Runequest resolve melee combat as a type of contest between attack and parry. But in RQ, the attack and parry are distinct skill bonuses. Whereas in RM, the PC has a single combat skill pool, and allocates it between attack and parry on a round-by-round basis.
One result of this is that the RM player has a lot of freedom, from round to round, to choose the level of risk/boldness for his/her PC. This makes it easier to drift Rolemaster combat resolution in a non-simulationist direction, as players make choices about risk/reward that don't just reflect the PC's point of view, but the player's emotional investment in the scene.
There are a number of other ways in which Rolemaster differs from Runequest by giving the player the opportunity to metagame decisions involved in both PC building and action resolution, all of which support this possibility of non-simulationist drift.
One result of this is that the RM player has a lot of freedom, from round to round, to choose the level of risk/boldness for his/her PC. This makes it easier to drift Rolemaster combat resolution in a non-simulationist direction, as players make choices about risk/reward that don't just reflect the PC's point of view, but the player's emotional investment in the scene.
There are a number of other ways in which Rolemaster differs from Runequest by giving the player the opportunity to metagame decisions involved in both PC building and action resolution, all of which support this possibility of non-simulationist drift.
4e has even more metagameable action resolution than Rolemaster, which - together with other features, some of which I noted above - make it especially well-suited for a scene-framing approach.
The easiest way to understand The Forge, I think, is as a massive reaction against Storyteller style, which has all this "story gaming" rhetoric but in practice involves railroading based on massive GM force. (It sounds as if [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] may have run them in a different fashion.)
I don't have a lot of personal experience with the White Wolf style games, but definitely experienced this phenomenon - GM force and railroading under the guise of "story" - in 1990s 2nd ed AD&D play. Of published 2nd ed modules, I would pick out Planescape's Dead Gods as a particularly egregious example.
It doesn't surprise me that Edwards spells it out.
First, thanks again for the kind words.
Second, for me the epistemic process was the opposite. I discovered The Forge more-or-less randomly in 2004 (I can't remember what link or Google search took me there) and found the GNS essays hugely interesting. (And had no prior knowledge of the Usenet discussions and analysis.) And naturally enough they made me think about my own playstyle. At that time I was GMing Rolemaster, and had been doing so for many years, and I was easily able to identify it as a purist-for-system simulation system (= process simulation). But what I and my group were doing with it seemed a bit different from sheer process simulation and world exploration: it seemed to have more in common with the vanilla narrativism that Edwards described. In particular, morality in our game emerged out of play and mostly at the metagame level of player decision and response, rather than ingame as part of the fiction. (I have a long time hatred of mechanical alignment!) And a lot of my play approximated more towards No Myth (improvised NPCs, locations etc) than heavy pre-prep, and that seemed to be a strength rather than a weakness.
So reading those essays, plus other posts, blogs etc, plus starting to look at some of the games Edwards referenced (Maelstrom Storytelling, HeroWars/Quest, etc), got me thinking more theoretically about my game and the techniques I was using. And I came to understand the Forge style in terms of my own play, rather than encountering it externally and not noticing it could be relevant to my own (very non-avant garde) fantasy RPGing.
This meant that when 4e started to be revealed by WotC, and some of its key features started to be revealed, I felt I had a fairly good handle on what was motivating the designers and what sort of play their game was meant to support. And therefore was pretty sure it would be a game I would enjoy - a level of mechanical crunch comparable to Rolemaster (for no very sensible reasons my group is pretty crunch-loving), but action resolution mechanics that would better support my preferred approach. (RM's PC build rules are pretty good for light fantasy narrativism play, but quite a bit of its action resolution is not.)
As I posted in a thread we were both in late last year, I'm surprised that it doesn't seem to be more common in D&D play. I really stumbled into it when I started GMing Oriental Adventures in 1986/87. I knew that I didn't really enjoy, and was also quite bad at, designing and adjudicating dungeons in the Pulsipherian/Gygaxian style. The difference that OA made was that the PCs had pretty clear inbuilt hooks (honour, family, etc etc) and so did the monsters (the Celestial Bureaucracy, etc), so it made it easy to build and adjudicate fun and engaging encounters on the fly.
After that I ran a two-person thief game in a similar way - of all the AD&D archtypes, I think the thief has the easiest inbuilt hooks (which in my view also explains some of the notorious problems of thieves in dungeon exploration, because it means having to ignore those hooks). And then I strated my series of long-running RM games, which is also how I met my current group.
I agree that there is a real difference. My path has been a bit different from yours, but since I've become more self-conscious about my techniques and have deliberately cultivated some and changed others, I've felt the difference too.
EDIT: One example of a deliberate change in technique - being a lot more upfront about stakes, for instance by table-talking with the players, and by using many fewer secret notes/one-on-one reveals and instead doing many reveals in front of the whole group even though only one or two PCs would know - thus setting up an emotional tension between what the players know and what their PCs know and can do about it. And giving them clear options for pushing the game forward to resolve those tensions. (Having been doing this for several years now, I've recently discovered that Robin Laws talks about this very technique in his "On the Literary Edge" essay in Over the Edge.)
Also, for what it's worth your explanations make sense to me, but I'm probably not the best test audience!
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Glad you're part of ENWorld, and great series of posts!
It seems a shame because the Pemertonian style ought to suit the Buffy setting etc very well, but the system and GM advice really weren't directed that way. 
