Fight! in Burning Wheel is action-by-action but scene-based; likewise extended conflict in the original HeroWars (maybe a bit less so in HeroQuest revised); and so I don't see them as necessarily contrasting.
I find that if resolution determines success at a task but doesn't in some clear way establish progress towards a goal for the scene, the overall outcome tends to become hostage to GM fiat.
As I said, Let it Ride with appropriate action declarations and consequences can be an alternative.
Right, THE major reason for Skill Challenges in 4e is exactly this. Contrast a 4e Skill Challenge with a 5e 'exploration pillar play sequence' (5e doesn't even provide terminology for it, though in some cases it might be loosely an 'encounter').
In 4e the GM stages an encounter and casts it as an SC (as opposed to a combat or a puzzle, the other two options). He's going to declare the 'rules' of the SC, which are typically (going by the RC rules) a complexity factor, and primary and secondary skill declarations for mechanics, plus he may note possible obstacles that might receive specific handling, like hard checks or whatever, though that can be done on the fly. This probably all happens in pre-game prep. When the scene is rolled out the fictional state will be established (according to some GMing principles, like 'skip to what is interesting'). Each move will then evolve the state based on the check result for that move, success or failure, until the complexity-determined end state is reached, when the plot of the scene will be fully resolved. If, for example, the challenge is complexity 1, then it will resolve at 3 failures or 4 successes, whichever comes first. This establishes 2 important things, how much the players need to make checks (and thus the valence of each check) plus the existence of an overall success/failure final state of the scene.
In contrast there's simply nothing like this in 5e, no structure at all in fact. The GM simply calls for checks. He can call for 1 check or 100 checks. There's no established principle of overall success or failure, and whether such even exists is something that can be established on the fly (as well as when it comes to pass, if it does). Thus there's no particular forward impetus. Technically a 5e 'scene' can last FOREVER! There is no inherent 'moving on' that is mechanically/structurally/procedurally required. Obviously there may be a lot of cases where success or failure are pretty obvious in the fiction at the end of the scene, but there's a lot of danger that this will be ambiguous or simply unresolved. It is difficult to know what ground the PCs have covered and thus what is 'theirs' in a narrative sense.
Some people felt 'constrained' by the 4e structure, and simply refused to engage much with SCs. Since 4e itself didn't really do away with 'free form checks' (IE action outside of any encounter, what in classic D&D would represent 'town action' or 'exploration mode') you can get away with that, and 4e is thus a pretty 'soft' version of this sort of mechanics. When I rewrote it for my own edification and play I literally wrote a rule that outlaws any dice outside of an encounter! I think the constraint is really a desire for a sort of GM force. Most GM's that focus on traditional or neo-traditional D&D play simply haven't developed a different tool set. The game may be allowed to go one of many ways based on character actions, but there's a greater or lesser degree of 'guiding hand' (possibly a mailed fist now and then!) which really cannot be deployed in good faith in something like an SC. That is, the GM still has control of the narrative to a pretty high degree, as he's bringing in the various plot developments, but they generally have to conform with the stated goal of the player in picking the action (another area where 4e is a bit 'soft', since it doesn't actually mandate that players explicate the results they expect in a narrative sense from taking an action). My 'flavor' of 4e is thus much 'harder', and a lot more different from 5e than regular 4e is (which can feel pretty trad depending on how you GM).
