It's difficult to verbalize my feelings on how a large swath of dnd players round peg square hole the shit out of 5e without sounding like a gatekeeper.
"If you homebrew dnd you're not playing dnd" isn't an argument of someone playing dnd wrong, if you ship of theseus it enough it's no long the product described in those 60 dollar books
If you remove spell slots and components, sounds like you want a game with a different magic system
If you rely on rule of cool to give characters big moments, it sounds like you want a game that has mechanical control over parts of the narrative
If you avoid Combat because it's boring and slow, it sounds like you want a game that prioritizes cinematic experiences or maybe doesn't involve combat at all?
If you try to fit super saiyans, devil fruits, rider belts, magical girls, kaiju, ninjutsu, or any other (X) in dnd into your game and struggle to make it feel right, then maybe you actually want to play another game.
Sure they may want a different game.
They may not want to Learn a different game. What happens if someone wants to remove those spell slots, and tries something else, but now that game breaks everything else it wants to do?
How do you even find that game? Every time someone brings up "Play another game" it always sounds so condescending to the DnD player, because often, there's no attempt to explain what a game does. How often have you heard people explain Call of Cthulhu with "oh play this if you want to do cosmic horror!" but with no real explanation of how it works?
What about "Oh you should play a PBTA game!"? What does that mean to someone with 0 frame of reference?
Sure, they may be happier by playing a new game, but learning a new game is daunting. Hell, DMing different games can be hard at times, because each game wants something different from you.
Comfort zones are hard to break.
