Gygax said alot of stuff. Alot of it was contradictory or didn’t match his actions
I don't actually see that as contradictory at all. I think what Gygax was looking to create as a game experience just happened to also be relatively realistic.
Its something I've noticed in game design that realism actually lends itself well to being gamified if you lean into it. Like, for example, getting lost in hex crawls. Its pretty common that the usual take, randomizing it, is lackluster and doesn't make much sense.
However if one looks to how people travelling can get lost in real life, the concept of navigational drift will pop up, which was something I was personally already familiar with from travelling off-road in real life and playing games where there's a lot of similar travel.
Because it isn't typically possible to travel in a true straight line, especially the rougher the terrain is and the longer the distance traveled, the traveller is going to drift off course, and if not regularly compensated for, this can result in pretty huge disparities in where you end up.
This naturally lends itself to a much more organic feeling means of getting lost, and I did it as a question of balancing the time you take to travel with the distance crossed in one go. Eg, you roll to move, and if you don't stop periodically to readjust your course (which means taking another round), your course can drift into other directions. It could still do with iteration as I haven't worked on Traversal stuff in ages, but the idea is there and it works as a less arbitrary way of doing it.
Particularly because the Players have full control over it and it doesn't impose itself on them unless they throw all caution to the wind and embrace getting lost, at which point the game rewards them with my Exploration stuff.