No. definitely not about cheating. Like in the situation of the bokken fitting in the crawlspace but a default staff not, I would absolutely prefer you to 'cheat' and just take the bloody thing with you. Far less jarring that way. The bokken is an object of certain agreed upon length, and behaves as such in the setting. If the rules fail to represent that properly, there's a disconnection and the rules have to change.
(Default staff stats in PHB are a perfectly valid representation of the combat stats of a long bokken. They're pretty bad representation of actual quarterstaff though, so I have houseruled them...)
I agree that it's easier just to handwave the situation I was describing, but I'd actually prefer to adhere strictly to the rules. I might say something like, "I'm worried about a loose stone collapsing on my companions, so I use my bokken as shoring and leave it behind." Or whatever.
And the reason I think it's important is so that there's a clear boundary. In the 5-Int Genius thread, Max kept throwing these scenarios at me, along the lines of "Well what if you're in a Zone of Truth and..." He was trying to find a way in which the alternative interpretation would cause actual rules to get broken, in a way that would give unfair advantage.
Or another example is the proficiency: in my fluff the only reason I'm not using a real longsword is that my sensei hasn't given me permission. If we take that fluff at face value, there's no reason I couldn't defy my sensei and pick up the real thing, even though that would break the metagame rules. But since I have zero intention of trying it, the rule remains inviolate.
I think that if you're going to play around with re-fluffing, it's important to be diligent about adhering to the rules.
Rules being disassociated from the fiction actively makes the game unfun to me and makes me stop caring about the rules altogether were I the GM or a player.
Maybe I'm not understanding what you mean here, but I don't see it as disassociation of the rules and the fiction at all. It's just swapping in a different fiction that is still tightly associated to the rules. E.g. my wooden sword. It still follows all the same rules in the same way, it just has different fluff.
(I know that you don't think things this way and it is a big part of the reason for our disagreement on the ASIs. We simply see the whole purpose of the mechanics differently.)
Yeah there's definitely some underlying principal that is common to these apparently unrelated debates.
