No he has a point. I'll use myself and my cheesemaking hobby as an example.If I read this right, you're using passive ability checks as the floor for a check?
That's entire valid, but I disagree with it. Passive checks are what happens when a PC is expending effort to do that thing over time. It's a time saving construction where you don't have to roll all the time, not a floor for active check. If a PC is on watch, I'm going to use their passive perception as the target for an assassin's stealth check to approach unseen. If the PC declares an action to specifically look at something, that's an active check, and the normal loop occurs (is there a consequence for failure, is the check not trivial, good, ask for a check). Using passive checks as a floor distorts the skill system and, as you note, almost requires DC inflation to keep things in check (heh).
Again, this is a perfectly valid way of doing things, I'm just registering a different approach and my personal dislike of it.
When I first started I began making mistakes that resulted in hard grainy cheese that couldn't really be called the kind of cheese it was supposed to be and could barely be called cheese in some early cases. Problem there is I suspected a bunch of possible things I was doing wrong and things that might help. Several batches of almost goat cheese later I was doing more things right and getting into identifying my big mistakes so my goat cheese was coming out closer and closer to what it should be. Turns out I misunyhow salting should work and was tearing apart the curds to mix in salt resulting in massively damaged curds. Let's say that goat cheese is dc8 with wine soaked cheese Colby or cheddar dc12 (or several lower checks to both. Under d20 rules every batch of all three has a chance that I will take the curds after they drain out the whey and use a fork to shred them to crumbs so I can mix in salt instead of properly cutting the curds and properly salting the outer surface... it also has a decent chance that each batch will properly do all that simply from d20 plus int/wis mod Passive floor ensures that I won't suddenly forget everything I learned about the time consuming hobby (typically 36-72hours after starting before any cheese is ready for aging)