Good examples of using alignment?

[Tragak]

Yes, it does. Race, class, level, feats, skills, and equipment are player choices that give the player some control over the experience they want in the game. Alignment doesn't give the player any real control, anymore than the character's hair color does, but it's used by others to get the kind of game they want. Race and class can be used that way, too, for good or ill, but those things at least provide inherent, rules-based benefits.

As you too have said, OOC communication works better for "control over the experience" than mechanical choices do.

And this thread isn't about alignment not causing problems (which it most certainly does, even if it's not the proximate cause), it's about alignment actually doing good when it's used. I would expect examples of players being unsure what their character, and then checking their alignment and having and interesting way forward suddenly made clear, or of players receiving useful guidance for playing characters different from themselves, or of alignment driving an interesting story element. I'm not seeing much of that.

Kind of like I didn't know how to role-play "What Would Ragnar do?" but then I asked "What Would a Ranger Do?" and got an amazing idea for what I should have Ragnar do, or I'd always thought that Wizards worked with Wizards and Druids worked with Druids, but then I played a Druid in a party with a Wizard and we worked together against other Druids/Wizards, things like that but with alignment instead?

Sounds easy enough. Just treat it the way you treat everything else in the game.