Thomas Shey
Legend
In general, I think people complaining about "exception-based design" are mostly complaining about how heavy the rules are more than anything else. It's a complaint about preference while feigning being merely descriptive. You can tell that to be the case because people only seem to use it to describe systems they wish to criticize.
Well, people who are happy with exception based design are far less to even know the term in the first place. I've certainly seen people who clearly prefer exception based design (its a topic that comes up in the superhero RPG sphere reasonably often) but they won't call it that, and there's little sign they even know the term.