saddened (but unsurprised) to see few others decrying the obvious strawmen
In general, the “market” for criticism just doesn’t seem very efficient at all! You might have hoped that people would mostly agree about what constitutes a flaw, critics would compete to find flaws in order to win status, and authors would learn not to write posts with flaws in them (in order to not lose status to the critics competing to point out flaws).
I wonder which part of the criticism market is failing: is it more that people don’t agree about what constitutes a flaw, or that authors don’t have enough of an incentive to care, or something else? We seem to end up with a lot of critics who specialize in detecting a specific kind of flaw (“needs examples” guy, “reward is not the optimization target” guy, “categories aren’t arbitrary” guy, &c.), with very limited reaction from authors or imitation by other potential critics.
The concept of measuring traits in standard deviation units did not originate in someone’s roleplaying game session in 2022! Statistically literate people have been thinking in standardized units for more than a century. (If anyone has priority, it’s Karl Pearson in 1894.)
If you happened to learn about it from someone’s RPG session, that’s fine. (People can learn things from all different sources, not just from credentialed “teachers” in officially accredited “courses.”) But to the extent that you elsewhere predict changes in the trajectory of human civilization on the basis that “fewer than 500 people on earth [are] currently prepared to think [...] at a level similar to us, who read stuff on the same level” as someone’s RPG session, learning an example of how your estimate of the RPG session’s originality was a reflection of your own ignorance should make you re-think your thesis.