Personally I find the weirdest part of the "a good DM could make it work" make-a-meticulously-crafted-narrative-and-setting-while-also-yes-anding-everything-that-wrecks-said-plans stance on DMing to be the fact that the people who claim their stance is "it's just a game, let people have fun" clearly also see failing to be a good DM as like, a moral failing rather than just not being good at a game, which is obviously morally neutral.
Either that or the way they treat said highly effort intensive approach to DMing as the obvious default such that other styles need not be mentioned and ought be implicitly disparaged. It's a very "one size fits all" "my way or the highway" stance from the "let people have fun" crowd to make absolute statements about what makes a "good" DM.
I'm not even as opposed to their styles of DMing as you folks seem to be, but the fact that it's so damn unquestioned, and that questions are met with ridicule, that bothers the fuck out of me.
One of the big issues is the idea of “DMing style” even existing, at least in a vacuum where they are universally applicable, when in reality different TTRPG rulesets themselves have preferred styles of play even if players or even the designers themselves are not aware of it.
Many very lauded “GMing styles” actually clash severely with the rules of many very popular TTRPGs, and it is when you expect the game master to fight against the rules to maintain this kind of already-high-effort “GMing style” that it destroys them.
Juggling is an impressive skill, and seeing a juggler in the right context is awesome, but it isn’t appropriate for all types of entertainment and certainly isn’t one I’d seek after for my, like, fishing trip, because fish are hard to juggle and even successfully juggling fish will not make the fishing trip any better.
The idea that juggling fish you catch with your bare hands while swimming against the current in this analogy is considered the bare minimum for a GM to be “good” is the problem. And if you just want to go fishing, which is what the majority of TTRPGs are about in this analogy, having a guy who can do that is not even desirable. Traumatized GMs have to be trained out of habitually trying to juggle anything you hand to them like their lives depend on it.
It’s why in Eureka, we spell out in very explicit terms up top that this RPG only works if you play it with the style it was meant to be played with, and GM it with the style it was meant to be GMed with. If you don’t, you’ll be fighting against the rules the whole time. Unfortunately the idea that all styles and preferences in TTRPGs are not valid for or universally applicable to all TTRPGs is shockingly offensive. All we’re really saying is the TTRPG equivalent of “No, you really should not try to play a ‘DPS’ in Animal Crossing.” In TTRPGs this is controversial.
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