I think that “Following the RAW is no guarantee of a good time.” is a red herring.

99% of published rpgs, from D&D onward, have terrible rules that would guarantee that you DON’T have fun if you would not change, ignore or drift them all the time. Most Indie players know this. Most traditional players know this. The authors know this, and the fill their books with exhortations to GMs to use the rules they like, not the one written on the book.

The point of RAW is not “being sure to have a good time”, it’s about “being sure to play THIS game, and not another one that I just made up”

To put it simply: to understand how a game works (and to understand even if you like it or not), you have to play it RAW.

If you don’t do that….   there is no middle point, if you don’t do that, you are one of two things, depending on your appreciation of your drifted rules: “this game is awesome, because if you don’t like a rule you can always change it”, or the “I tried baseball and it didn’t work”  (if you don’t know that hilarious article, search it on google, it will be worth it)

What if you simply don’t care about knowing how a game play, really? No problem, there is no RAW-police, but I would really, really like if people who didn’t care stopped posting reviews and comments about games they have really not played, ever.

(obviously there are rules so minor that ignoring them don’t change a game a lot. But I don’t trust most of the GMs to be able to separate them from important rules. Do you know how many posting about DitV are from people who thought that the town creation rules were minor and optional, and played it like a whodunnit?)