Neonchameleon
Legend
My point is that if schools are something that apply only to wizards (as, in practice, they do) and wizards can't heal (which they can't) then that healing doesn't fit in the schools of magic doesn't matter. It is a type of magic that wizards don't categorise well because they don't do.I don't know. Who cares about any point you're trying to make here? Who cares about any of this really? Is this the route that you wanna take, Neonchameleon? A rude hand-waved dismissal?
It's little more relevant a criticism than "Is a longbow a handgun or a rifle?" Well, no, it's not either although it might have some characteristics that overlap.
And once more you are asking questions that aren't particularly relevant. Indeed you're falling down exactly the same purity rabbit hole that the attempts to put schools of magic in opposition to each other made. To quote you:I'm skeptical that they do work because it's pretty clear that many spells that exist in the game exist to be work-arounds for the different schools of magic, as in how many ways can non-evocation schools of magic get spells that are damaging evocation spells in all but name? Or to put it another way, let's take the spells from the PHB and give them to someone who doesn't have any foreknowledge of which spells belong to which tradition, give them tradition guidelines, and then ask them to sort the spells into the various traditions. What is the likelihood that many or most would end up in the expected tradition? We could even repeat this experiment with different people. I suspect that the thematic groupings
Most new players, IME, approach magic more thematically. For example, they want to play an elementalist, or a fire mage, or a dark magic, etc.
And you were absolutely right. But in order to play a dark mage (which as mentioned isn't catered to in D&D 5e as it uses the same school as the necromancer*) then the dark mage needs to be able to cast damaging dark spells that do shadowy things. And yes some of these dark and damaging spells will mechanically look like evocations. But they need to be there to enable the thematic casters to work properly. You are making exactly the mistake made between Unearthed Arcana and the end of 3.5 with opposition schools of magic. Schools of magic should serve the game, not the other way around. The goal of schools of magic should be to encourage more viable character types - not to sacrifice viable character types on the procrustean bed of a defined magic system. And if that means almost doubling up some spells to put them in different schools then that's not a problem. If it means that some spells have multiple school tags attached then that's not a problem either.
* This is actually a mistake made by the 5e designers getting fluffier. When the pre-4e specialist wizards were bland and just got extra spells and +1s in their school then having the Necromancer and Nethermancer as the same school of magic made sense; necromancers cast dark spells because of course they do. And Nethermancers sometimes raise wraiths and skeletons. The same school covered both because there was about a 75% overlap between what they did and if you didn't want the rest of the school you just didn't take the spells. But with 5e actually making specialist wizards better at their own types of magic 100% of the dark-and-necromantic school went to the Necromancer specialism.