A Monk with Ki Strike (Adamantine) probably ought to be able to punch through a conventional wooden wall without getting more than one or two points of damage total from the shattered piece of wall (that'd be a house rule though), because he's essentially (by the RAW) hitting wood with adamantine. Not that that's something that makes a whole lot of sense ..
A low-level monk wouldn't be able to deal enough damage to bypass the hardness 20 of Adamantine anyways.
In one of the groups I'm in as a player, I'm essentially a Rules Reference - when somebody doesn't remember exactly what a rule is, I'm the one they turn to and ask, including the DM on occasion.
I'm also, to an extent, what I consider a powergamer - I pick a niche for my character and try and get him to be above average for what he does and better than the rest of the party at it, but I don't try and exploit every single possibility I can, I pick and choose, and my PCs are generally decent at at least one or two things outside of their specialty, but not always.
I don't recall anybody having called me a powergamer, yet, but that's probably because my PC's go into situations outside of their niches to help out - the current party is a monk, a druid, a rogue, a favored soul of Olidammara, a bard, and my scout. My scout's supposed to be a ranged expert, but because he's carrying a big melee weapon (a falchion, he's racially proficient) and has got a decent attack bonus with it, he's winding up in melee more than he is shooting in order to keep the monk and rogue(who spends his time split between melee and archery too) from getting overwhelmed - he's sometimes actually engaged in melee on his own because the monk and rogue are covering the approaches to the casters. Melee's not really his thing, straight archery is - he's got the best ranged attack and damage in the party, but he's not exclusively optimized to archery - he's got decent melee capability, too, but he's by no means the best character that he could be, he's good, above average, but not the best.
In essence, we're all technically min-maxers/powergamers to an extent - I mean, how many of us would, for an archery range-expert PC take our feat selections straight melee and mounted - probably next to none, we'd take our feat selections towards archery/ranged combat in general, i.e. Point Blank Shot, Precise Shot, find me an archery-expert type character without those two feats - it'd be pretty hard to pull off - we pick feats that go with our intended character build, not ones that are for a different build.
