When I read a book, watch a movie or play a game, I want it to make sense. An element of this is - generally speaking - giving writers the benefit of a doubt when something falls apart. It doesn't always work, some handwaving is necessary and some problems can't be dealt with even by handwaving, but often the results are pretty good - the world works. Also, you're wrong that these efforts are doomed to fail if the writers ever revisit the subject - one of my problems with DA Lore was Arlathan. It was easy to "fix" since nobody remembered well what really happened, but it made no sense for me that Elvhenan (As powerful as it was described) could fall like that to Tevinter (a nation of barbarians by comparison). Magic? Elves were better. Blood magic? Bah, elves had that too. Advantage in numbers? Well, that was still a time when Elves ruled the continent. It felt flimsy, one of my attempts at rationalizing this was that perhaps Elvhenan wasn't as united as it seemed - and a disastrous civil war would be a nice element laying ground for a slightly more realistic scenario of Tevinter conquest. And guess what - now it's pretty much confirmed...
I don't see how reveling in the feeling of superiority that "I see how what they created doesn't make sense" would be better than explaining it to myself so that it does make sense, especially when we're talking about a subject that is very unlikely to be ever examined closely enough to refute my explanation.
Also, there is another, perhaps more specific bit - i play RPG; the real kind, I mean, pen&paper. A consistent world has, in fact, value in and of itself, even separated from these particular stories we play through or read about in canon material. I can have much more fun in this world than the game itself has coded in
But a setting not making sense "because they can't write military conflicts" would be a problem. So, unlike you, i definitely find attempts to explain those not-making-sense bits so that they make sense to be worthwhile.
Yes, I agree: it's nice for things to make sense. But they don't make sense. They self-evidently don't make sense. In most cases, they would have to be completely retconned to make sense. And even if all they required was clarification from the writers - "oh, we
implied that, sure, but you can twist around the words and actually it meant
this" - that would still be completely out of your hands.
Take this Exalted March thing. It's already been
rewritten clarified at least once. There's a very clear change of emphasis there. There's no reason they couldn't change emphasis again. It happened in the setting's past, after all. It's not like there's something sitting there, in-game, happening in front of the player, clearly showing everybody that LOL THIS IS NOT RIGHT. You can play the "limited historical accounts, we don't know what REALLY HAPPENED" card. There are plenty of other examples that
are from the game. And they are equally implausible, if not more so!
Like the fact that your army at Skyhold is camping out on a frigging glacier. Where is everybody getting food? Are they eating the snow? Armies can't do that. If armies stay together outside of campaigning season, they stay in valleys or plains or other temperate places where they can actually get food. They can't bring large amounts of food overland to someplace else, because that's
actually impossible unless you have, like, railroads, or the internal combustion engine. Absent those things, when you stay in an even
slightly inhospitable place for long-term quarters, most of your army starves, gets horrendously sick, and dies. Far from serving as the nucleus for a grand army to defeat Corypheus, Skyhold would
at best end up being like Valley Forge, which was only, y'know, the most grievous defeat that the Continental Army ever suffered.
It's really really hard for me to imagine a way for them to come up with a way to make it so that Skyhold is not in the Frostbacks, or that the army that the player sees with her own eyes, tents scattered throughout the pass, is not there. I mean...that would completely change a lot of things! It is a fairly integral part of the game experience!
Going by that, and by other things in the setting, it seems as though the writers don't really acknowledge the issue of food supply. Not just in military operations, although there is that. But in other contexts, too. Orzammar supposedly relies on food from the surface. Like, this comes up in
Origins and it comes up in
Inquisition. It is not as in-your-face as Skyhold is, but it's a present concern. But where does all this food come from? Overland? Through that Frostback pass from
Origins? It can't have been through the water connection that Orzammar doesn't have. Even Daerwin's Mouth hasn't been used in centuries, and only appears to connect to Orzammar by way of intermediary thaigs and Deep Roads anyway. Or take the siege of Adamant, which is apparently a set-piece engagement between two sizable forces in the middle of a total wasteland. Again: what are they eating? These aren't gaps in our knowledge of the setting that await only headcanon to be bridged. They're just stuff that don't make no sense.
The writers'
tactics sometimes leave things to be desired, as well. The Battle of Ostagar, for instance, can theoretically make sense if you assume that everybody involved was a complete idiot, including the Warden and Alistair, but also encompassing Duncan, Cailan (of course), and Loghain (whose actions made little sense if he was betraying Cailan and made even less sense, if that's possible, if he wasn't betraying Cailan). But that's not very much fun. And it seems clear that the writers don't
want you to assume that everybody involved was a complete idiot, because they know that's not very much fun. Ostagar isn't portrayed in subsequent media as a Clash of the Morons. It's supposed to be a terrible tragedy with ostensibly complex (or at least inscrutable) causes, the sort of thing that was destined to be an argument topic for decades. It seems unlikely that the writers would rewrite Ostagar. Instead, they'll do what they did in
Inquisition - poke a little fun at the endless arguments, emphasize the unknowable nature of it all, and move on with more important things like the story that they actually want to tell.
I mean, there are just
so many examples of why the devs just aren't making a plausible setting. Because they're obviously not trying to. That's their Thing. They're not academics. (Which is a good thing, because academics are usually terrible writers of fiction.) This is true of most fiction - worldbuilders simply can't work through all of the plausibility angles, or follow all the potential implications of something new. I'm sure that plenty of your PnP campaigns follow the same sort of track. We can pretty much assume that implausibilities exist; the only differences are what, exactly, they are, and how badly they break a given person's willing suspension of disbelief.
The point isn't "hurf durf loogit dumb biower righters who dunno HISTRY". It's not "reveling in the feeling of superiority", because whenever I look at what authors of fiction can do that I can't, "superiority" is not what I feel. It's recognizing fictional worlds for what they are. And it's not expecting them to be things they aren't; just as I wouldn't expect readable prose out of 99% of the journal articles I read, I wouldn't expect fictional settings to to fully worked-through with no flaws. It's an acknowledgment that fixing creators' mistakes is at best an endless runaround that can only possibly benefit oneself and which is likely to cause more problems than it solves anyway. I personally think that this is an intensely liberating thing, and I think that it's an entirely reasonable 'third option'. Obviously, you don't buy in. Which is fine, too, I guess. I suppose I wanted to make the point that you were drawing a false dichotomy in your earlier post, and that all this argument is probably much ado about nothing.