I was unclear in what I was saying; what I was suggesting that from a game point of view, I don't think the all-or-nothing of advantage/disadvantage produces good results; it encourages you to find the minimal way to get advantage and then not bother, because the rests is effort with no reward.
Meh, usually there's one nice big fat cinematic element there which you take. The rest? What is really gained? If you are playing old school 'skilled play' D&D, then sure, that would probably be a fairly valid criticism. I'm not aiming for that. I think tactics are fun, and HoML for instance HAS those, but just not to an extreme. You get into a good position, you take cover, you enable some sort of protection, etc. and that does what you need. It also makes the fiction very clear, you ducked behind the pillar, the manticore's spikes ricochet off the stone, breaking away chips of rock and flying off into the darkness, it missed! Why do I need to sort through three different possible explanations for that when one will do?
There are also potentially other things you can say about this too. For example PCs in my game get to pick defenses, and the players make all the checks. So, they have a bunch of different kinds of choices potentially already. In other kinds of situations there is a challenge framework, you are not likely to be rolling a check that represents every factor and element of the success of your plan entirely in one toss of the dice (I mean, maybe that will happen, maybe it won't). So, does every factor have to play into every roll? I don't think so.
All told my feeling was that directness and simplicity and just a very clean interface to story telling is the key thing I'm going for, not an exercise in generating a laundry list of modifiers to scrounge for on every roll. But obviously there can be different factorings of what does what, why, and where in a game.