Abstractions are fine as long as they're internally consistent. Hit points, is particular, work really well for me, if they model damage the same way for everyone (as they do in tabletop RPGs).
And many game systems will even make explicit what XP actually represent, allowing the actual acquisition of skills to be done off-screen.
Fair enough. Yours is not an unreasonable position at all, especially If you value consistency and certain sort of transparency / explicitness above all else. Or at least see everything else as a subsidiary to them. However if I clarify this "negative cherry picking", I meant, that even these time-tested and usually working mechanics can easily have internal flaws within them. Because they reduce these excessively complex events to simple and highly abstract mechanics (the difference between HP / XP mechanics and strict class differences in a principle level are often just certain ambiguity on in-game lore details and intense approximation, i.e. soldiers are usually better shooters than seamstresses, even if nothing intrinsically prevents a seamstress from being a better shooter. So class-rules should reflect these type of averages, in expanse of variety, exceptions and details, thus a priori restrictions).
I picked those two, because despite their internal consistency and universality, they tend to occasionally produce oddities and counterproductive results to their intent, which sometimes break the in-game lore, in very similar manner as class restrictions.
As an example about HPs and trauma, many old school fantasy RPGs (D&D, Runequest, Stormbringer, etc) have an odd relation between HP pools of your typical NPC commoners / peasants, and strength and DMG of some common domesticated animals, like horses. Little depending on a game, but usually a mortality rate of a landed horse kick for an average commoner was something between 50-100% (like if I recall right, in D&D commoners have ~4 HPs, and horse's kick hits them 55% and does 1d6+1 / 1d4+1 DMG, and horses do two kicks per round). Naturally this doesn't reflect at all of what a kind of world games are trying to represent, despite that a horse kick obviously sometimes can be fatal. Tweaking DMG or HP might give a more believable situation between these two subjects, but usually when you fix one leak like this, an another appears between either of these and some other subject. Ad hoc rules and duct tape with something this specific rarely work, and lead to different sort of problems.
A system simple as RPG rules almost categorically are, cannot produce all different variety and detail 100% believably or consistently, when the scale is everything from humans, rats to huge mythological beasts like dragons.
1st edition AD&D contained extensive rules relating to construction, and each different material had its own saving throw table. Is it a wooden structure? Save vs. Fire. Oh, it was a Fireball? Save vs. Magical Fire......snip
Sorry for the confusion, but by the fireball and buildings comparison I was referring to CRPGs based on AD&D, e.g. Baldur's Gate 1&2. Not the AD&D tabletop system itself, which indeed has rules for setting buildings on fire (along with rules for everything else really, not always as written but by a DM's proxy), which understandably are not incorporated to any video game. Or at least ones I've played. Presumably even if they are used in some games, technical limitations would force them to be only partially applied and be heavily scripted as part of preset encounters, unlike in the tabletop. The point was to demonstrate that finding these unexplained inconsistencies between a lore and gameplay tends to be a bottomless bog in just about any CRPG.
Evaluating or comparing these individually can rarely give out much except something along with following lines: 1) I think this is bad, nonsensical and immersion breaking. 2) most people find this is bad, nonsensical and immersion breaking. 3) this is worse, more nonsensical and immersion breaking than X, because (insert subjective and often anecdotical arguments - almost always related to signaling writer's taste, cleverness, knowledge, or affection to some game/company/genre/interest group/ideology/etc). Still almost objectively some flaws are more harmful than others, but dissecting and analyzing individual parts with any kind of reliability and reproducibility seems to be permanently out of reach. I am thinking that at the point when and if it isn't, bots can produce creative content equal or superior to peoples'.
If the lore consistency and inexplicableness are only problems, why is magic-users' unexplained inability to use certain weapons so bothering, but not very selectively affecting fire. In my mind this requires more preferences than just the desire for consistency and clarity. Something like the following statement: "all player characters should be able to use any weapons or learn any kind of skills, unless provided explicit in-game reason against". How "true" this statement is, or how good RPGs would come by following it, is a different discussion altogether. Unless the intention is to justify or promote one's preferences by pointing out "stupidities" selectively (class limitations are stupid. Look why can't a mage use a long sword or an engineer incendiary rounds. That makes no sense, thus classless system is superior).
The whole "mages cannot use certain weapons" is a bit more complicated in the tabletop though. How BG handles the issue is just an interpretation of the said somewhat vague rule. My educated guess is that this was entirely consequent of trying to implement the rule-set to a new and vastly different environment, other factors like the lore consistency probably didn't weight much into the decision, which I assume was considered to be a minuscule detail. I've encountered at least 3 different ways to operationalize these weapons restriction rules in-game (one is my own, two others by two other GMs I've played AD&D with). All them along with BG's one are equally valid, but each of them produce slightly different albeit similar results (one of my friend's was somewhat similar to your example of L.E. Modesitt's ChaosWar books). BG offers the simplest and most arbitrary solution: you just can't, which would be consider bad DMing by most. I was bothered by many things in BG (especially in the first one), but this never bothered me slightest. I guess, I have different expectations and standards between different mediums, even if both are called RPGs.
I follow the reasoning wherever it leads.
Reasoning scheasoning. That stuff can lead you into strange places. Now after reading your replies, I don't exactly find a problem in your deductions, but your starting points for those deductions, basic assumptions and preferences seem to be quite different from mine, so I doubt that this conversation can progress much more than this.Was a pleasure 
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