Challenge fosters fun. Attrition involves large periods of not very challenging areas to get to where the challenge is actually directly present.
What attrition does for a game is gives you something to lose other than the challenge as a whole or your character as a whole. You walk out of a _______ (round of combat, encounter, dungeon) with less <something> than when you entered it. It's one of the most straightforward ways to introduce gradation in outcome (instead of 'you succeeded'/'you failed'/'you failed so hard you lose your character'; you add 'you succeeded but expended resources' and 'you failed despite spending resources'). It also provides a set of codified points* where the player gets to make success-determining decisions (the most straightforward of which being, 'do we press on with the resources we have left?').
*Instances of making important decisions would exist anyways, but are situational and GM-dependent.
In an ideal system, potions would be a last resort to keep fighting. Slow natural recovery works in the interim.
Okay, you did not mention in your original post that potions would be the exception to the norm for how this resource was recovered. It's unsurprising that people did not assume SNR as the primary mechanic. Thing is, if that's the case then we are back to resting as a primary method of returning to full resource reserve. In that case, I don't see how we aren't back to, as you put it, "trying to negotiate for what amount of time we're going to skip for arbitrary reasons." We've just added a bypass method that, again, I don't think the rest of us think is better verisimilitude and we really haven't gotten a compelling case from you for why it is better. Probably because...
Its high time to abandon it. Its dumb and the pearl clutchers can be ignored.
This kind of cynicism undermines itself when it fails to think more than a step ahead.
You're being obtuse and cynical; all these things are prime to provide deeper mechanics and gameworlds.
Or you're just being deliberately contemptuous and should just stop engaging if you're all you're going to do is troll.
Okay so you don't actually understand what Im saying at all and aren't even trying.
Thereby wasting time. Congrats, the princess is dead now cause you're desperate to make a point with not a leg to stand on.
You're trying too hard and too obviously.
Yeah I don't buy it. You're trolling and its obvious. Stop replying to me, Im not engaging this naughty word past this point.
...because of this.
Honest question, you do realize that this is the 100% perfect way
not to convince anyone of the validity of your position, right? You are
declaring other peoples' positions to be in the wrong somehow rather than
making the case for it (or better yet, acknowledging their reservations with your proposal and making the case for how your proposal addresses those reservations). Right from the jump, you started with framing hypothetical opposer to your position to be something people think of as inferior/wrong (pearl-clutchers). That set the expectation that the discussion wouldn't be about carefully reasoned and well articulated* points, but about verbal diatribes and brickbats.
*and to be clear, your audience tells you if you have successfully communicated your point.
Now, it's obvious that a large portion of the thread participants haven't bought into your proposal (at least not as they currently understand it). That isn't going to change by you excoriating people with accusations of trolldom or deliberate obtuseness until everyone just sighs and stops following the thread. So, as advise (take it or leave it as you see fit), I would suggest you instead look to the issues people raise related to your proposal and answer them with succinct cases and clarifications. Even if you do not believe an individual is asking them in good faith, it provides an answer for the third party individual reading the thread who also may have reservations, not understand your positions as you see it, etc.
All any of us are tabula rasa on this board. All we have are our words to convince each other of the rightness of our positions or the brilliance of our ideas.
