Thomas Shey
Legend
Yes I am sure. However, please understand I am not making any value judgements only looking for discussion.
All right.
My position is that while not everything can have a mechanic associated with it precisely, the more things that don't, the more the game turns into an exercise in seeing if your world view and the GMs coincide (theoretically, it could be whether your and the rest of the group's world view coincide, but I can't say I've seen many "the answer is not on your sheet" types who weren't also pretty GM-power-centric), and you can all too easily find out the answer to that the hard way.
My argument about mechanics in the past is that sometimes mechanics tell you dumb things, but at least you know what they're going to tell you in advance if you want to. And if the dumb things involve any common events, you can try to get the GM and/or group to address that in advance at least as easily as you can convince a GM that his position on how likely something is to work to change.
(As with most things, this isn't a binary situation of course; relatively few games have mechanics associated with, say, taking over a criminal organization, so that's going to be thrown into the GM's perceptions anyway, but a lot of that has to do with the relative hostility to serious social mechanics that's still pretty common in the hobby and/or the situation just not being common enough to justify the book real estate and design overhead needed to cover it).