What, you've never heard of molecular gastronomy?
I would argue that cooking--like brewing and baking--is something which actively defies the art vs science distinction.
It has many characteristics of art: aesthetic value is of immense importance, pattern/symmetry and variation/divergence are high concerns, different people may (dis)like or (dis)value different things, and there are a wide variety of traditions that one cannot meaningfully put on a commensurate axis of comparison.
But it has many characteristics of science: reproducible effects, building up observational data, creating admixtures of specific components (often in specific ratios), refining technique, collecting data, testing different approaches, etc.
To say that it is more art than science dismisses the immense utility that scientific understanding can bring to the process: what things can be preserved easily or require special storage or care, ways that the same chemical reaction can occur faster or more effectively if other ingredients are added, precise temperatures and durations to improve quality or safety or quantity, etc. But of course to call it more science than art is to basically say that there is a "correct" way to make any given dish, which is silly, and to say that one could in some way quantify universal standards for cooking, which is patently ridiculous.
And, to loop things back to D&D and my earlier comment on balance, that's how I see encounter design as well. It is
equal parts art and science, IF the mechanics actually do the work of giving you that science. Just as baking and brewing and cooking are impoverished by forcing a person to work ONLY with intuition and guesswork, never allowing them to develop any scientific understanding of what they're doing, encounter design is impoverished by forcing DMs to use a "system" that is frequently wrong, almost totally unreliable, and little better than mere guesswork. Having the
tool of a highly effective, generally-reliable encounter-building system enables more, not less; it helps avoid pitfalls (or pratfalls) and supports DMs trying to tailor for a specific experience (and, as 4thcore showed, it's entirely compatible with
brutally hard, no-holds-barred challenges.) When coupled with the aforementioned Nastier Specials rules, which function like extra spice, extra kick for your encounters if you desire it, there's very little you can't do.
You can always decide not to add more pepper. Believe me when I say, you
can't decide to take it away. (I once had a pepper pot pop open while I was adding some...I fished as much out as I could, but eating the soup I'd made was
miserable.)
