Been saying this ever since Jeremy Crawford took over. Dude does not appear to have a handle on the vision of D&D5. Deeply concerned that we're looking at the second coming of D&D3.5.
Yeah that's an interesting point.
One of the major reasons we stopped playing 3.XE was that the game tried to define every possible situation, and ended up with a "rule for everything", something PF1 doubled down on (looking at you stairs handedness penalties). But doing this didn't make the game better - not even as a "simulation". It just made us need to look things up way more and roll more dice (usually with tons of penalties).
4E backed off from this a bit, weirdly enough, with Page 42, Skill Challenges and so on. And where it did go detailed rules, it was to a specific end - a tactical combat game. Not everyone loves that but there was some actual cost-benefit.
With 5E, one of the nice things is it's a bit more relaxed and DM-guided and open-minded. Jeremy Crawford often comes out with his understandings of the rules, and the collective D&D community often laughs him off the stage (you should hear how the 5E reddit talks about his SA lol!). I don't think he minds, and sometimes he even acknowledges that his take might be a bit weird (albeit other times he's mystified when basically no-one agrees with him). His Sage Advice is just as terrible as Sage Advice in 2E, but even easier to ignore, because we're not teenagers now lol.
But goddamn, if that was translated to a VTT? I mean I don't think he'll personally come and enforce his vision - though I suspect any fraught rules implementations might go to him - instead we'll have dozens of unnamed Jeremy Crawfords making their own choices about how certain rules work, and I'm sure Crawford and Perkins will see some of that, but no way all of it, and even if they did, Crawford's takes are often wack. It'll be the closest to the "Rules Police" we're likely to ever see.
Now it is possible they'll go for something much looser, but that's antithetical to accessibility and mass-market appeal I'd suggest. Most people using this will want it to "just work", esp. they'll be paying a subscription. They don't want to fiddle around the way you need to in Roll 20 or whatever. It's also likely they'll have an override so the DM can create arbitrary checks, apply arbitrary damage/healing/movement and so on, but are they going to do that every time an ability you understand one way and Crawford understands another way goes off? What of house rules? I'll be impressed if they can make anything sane out of that.
