I'm sure this is good advice for a wide cohort of RPGers. But I don't see how you can possibly think that it is playstyle neutral, given that there are quite a few playstyles in which the rules play a key role in capturing the imagination, and rather than "stay out of the way of good gaming" are a crucial component in good gaming. Your advice simply doesn't make sense for those playstyles.
Well, regardless of playstyle, a shared narrative exists comprising all the elements of a narrative: a setting, characters, and plot. All of those elements could exist without rules. In the applied sense, any in-game outcome produced during an rpg session could have been produced without rolling any dice or consulting any books. The rules may change the probability of certain outcomes, but it is a literal impossibility that a D&D book tells me something that is beyond the capacity of human imagination.
So I think it's fair to characterize rpg rules-of any sort-as being an optional and non-essential part of the experience. Because of that, I certainly hope that the rules
aren't the main motivating factor for engaging the player base.
However, there probably are people who wouldn't be engaged with the game experience itself, and are instead engaged by mechanical elements. To me, this would be like going to see the latest Hobbit movie for the computer-generated battles; it's kind of missing the point. But in both cases, even people who are entering the hobby through something of a tangent are in it, I guess it's fair to say.
However, it would be quite unnatural for someone interested in process rather than content to be drawn in by parity of choices. Instead, quite the opposite. Analyzing and breaking down the value of various player choices is a significant venue for enjoyment, and I don't see any reason to beat down the min/maxers and tell them that powergaming is wrong and their work should effectively be made irrelevant by the equality of choices.
Conversely, someone who evaluates the rules as a simulation engine will not be looking for the kind of balance we're talking about, and indeed will be appalled at some of the steps taken to create said balance, as it defies the kind of logic they are looking for.
So to me, the people who use the mechanics as a window into the world, or the people who enjoy playing with mechanics for mechanics' sake and show up every week for that reason, are the conscientious objectors to the idea of an artificially mandated balance between PC options. And indeed, I've known some of both. If there are people for whom a lack of parity in various character creation options is a significant factor in dissuading them from from participating or engaging in the game, I've yet to meet them. I'm sure there are some.
But from what I can tell, the rationale put forth for it seems to be from the "player entitlement" crowd. Reading through some of the posts in this thread and its current relatives leads me to believe that some people have somehow developed an implicit player bill of rights, and some of those rights apparently create a mandate for some type of balance (the nature of which varies from poster to poster). Depending on who you ask, all characters must be roughly equal in every way, or equal within certain "pillars", or equal if the player makes a particular choice, and so on and so on.
However, I'm not aware of any textual support from the rules for these rights, and they are not part of my conception of the game at large (as opposed to the game at one group's table). As far as I'm concerned, players don't have rights (at least with regards to what happens with their characters in the game), unless they are set up as part of some social contract with a particular DM. Though it would be interesting to try and suss out what they are and if there is any consensus on them. The term "playstyle" is used so ubiquitously it's hard to tell what it means, but I would not consider player entitlement a playstyle.
