In this respect, do they model physical injury any better?Hit points may represent an number of things, but they're pretty terrible and modeling the effects of fear, despair, hope, inspiration, or adrenaline. Primarily, this is because they have no effects until you hit 0 hit points.
Obviously in 4e "leaders" buff (or debuff enemies) as well as heal. But restoring hp is one of the main ways of helping a D&D PC perform better!I would probably go with an inspiration bonus or advantage to actions. Benefits to overcoming fear effects. Things like that.
<snip>
Inspiration should actually help you perform better.
Huh? That's not my reading of Tolkien, or 4-colour superheroes, or the romantic fantasy genre in general.Leaders outside of the game seldom encourage allies to fight on.
In 4e hit point loss does matter before you reach zero ("bloodied"); most healing is not Cure X Wounds (that is reserved for surgeless healing); hit points do not take a long time to recover; and morale effects (eg psychic damage, and skill challenges to inflict hit point loss via social skills) do burden hit points.You're absolutely right that the explanation of hit points in the game text, the most detailed being in 1e, has always been that hit points have both a physical and non-physical component. However this explanation didn't square well with the way hit points actually functioned in rules terms - their loss is irrelevant until a character is down to zero, which seems to indicate that they represent nothing important, either physical or non-physical; healing spells are named Cure X Wounds, which seems to indicate that they are purely physical; hit points take a long time to recover, which also seems to indicate that they are physical; there are game features which affect morale, luck, skill and so forth but these don't seem to have a bearing on hit points, for example the spell bless in 1e affects morale but not hit points.
So there's always been this contradiction
So at least in that edition the contradiction was signficantly reduced if not completely eleminated.