Many of these debates fall into the Oberoni fallacy: just because a DM can fix things with house ruling, doesn't mean the thing is not broken. That, and many message board people use the rules-as-written as a baseline for discussions, because it's one of the few valid comparisons we have.

A corollary of this is that quite frequently, people who play with the (good) kind of DM who fixes things, don't realize that they are broken. So there's a clash between people who argue from the special case of their personal experience, and those who argue from the general case of the rules-as-written.