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Exalted is not a religion. If god IRL provably and absolutely existed and said/indicated that doing the funky chicken dance is the path into heaven, we would say, "That's stupid" and start dancing. Until and unless Exalted is a religion, saying, "The good book says so" doesn't even raise you to the level of a crazy homeless street preacher.
Good. It's not a religion, so it's safe to errata or houserule away the bits you disagree with, without fearing that a mob of pitchfork-wielding jackie chan inquisitors will knock down your door. But before doing that, one has to admit that the undesired statement is
in fact in the book before one can go about
changing it one way or another.
...
Oh my gods. Wow. That's like cargo-cult Borgstromancy.
Is... is that what you're taking as a profound metaphysical statement? Rules text telling people that they can't avoid using the Mass Combat system if other people are using it, to avoid both the problem of "One lot of people are trying to resolve things in ticks, the other in long ticks" and also the "I don't have any War, so I'm going to engage them as a solo unit so my Melee isn't capped by my War". The "it's the nature of Creation" is just a glued on bit of fluff, in the same sense that Solar Larceny has glued on fluff saying "it's okay for you to use this charm to bypass people's locks, because if they had nothing to hide they wouldn't lock their doors".
It's a reading of the text with the assumption that the authors are being sincere and that the words have meanings. Besides, such a statement is a statement from the author to the GM and/or players; it doesn't have a protagonist-mentality flavour; it doesn't have a hint of being done from the PoV of an unreliable narrator; it's a statement about the rules and what they represent. It is much more explicit than, say, the totally non-explicit statement that Solars can perfectly disguise themselves as Human-Sized Flying Cthulhu without illusions and without shapeshifting and without tools (which
doesn't explain how the possibility of such disguises is part of the nature of Creation).
Is the MC combat system ugly? Sure it is. Does it need to be fixed? Yes. Does this player here want to know precisely how does Railgun work so good while Butterfly Swarm work so bad in MC? YES! But the book has the words it has, and anything beyond them will need to be invented (or, probably better than that,
changed) by the GM or by whoever writes Errata version 2¾ (yeah, not happening).
No. Because that would be stupid. And reading rules text about how you don't get to engage a mass combat unit in single combat and force your GM to resolve a fight of you against 10,000 legionaries separately and deciding that this means that all the bad mechanics of Mass Combat are literally physical law, rather than being a mechanical abstraction, is a similarly unwise thing to do.
Trying to argue that a poor mechanical abstraction is hard physical law because of fluff thrown in around rules text is a losing game. I'd consider your point if there was an actual examination of what "holy shit, area affect weapons are useless against formations compared to high damage single target attacks" would do to warfare. But there isn't. And it's dumb to argue that the mechanical abstraction is the way the universe really works when sorcery is packed full of AOE damage spells intended to be used against armies, artillery weapons do things like fire jugs full of burning tar over groups of men, and the setting completely fails to support your hypothesis that this is what the text means.
"Thrown
fluff" is typically some sort of statement about the setting (including the opinions of persons within the setting, in the case of the Larceny example you posted). Often uninformative statement, or, conversely one providing
bad information (i.e. cementing facts that are undesirable for the GM and players), but about the setting nonetheless.
And here we get to the root of your problem with understanding how the Exalted community works: nobody will ever accept your assertion that the ability to kick everything in Creation to death a) is supposed to be part of the setting, b) is actually part of the setting or c) is anything other than an obvious mistake.
You're not going to get anywhere by insisting otherwise, mate. Things that cause massive stupid consequences are treated as mistakes, because they are obvious mistakes. There is no convention of "it is written, therefore it must be correct, no matter how dumb". If some piece of text somewhere in a sourcebook doesn't work, we do not jump through twisted contortions of logic to try to make it work: it just doesn't work and is therefore discarded.
This is the case because it is actually literally impossible to treat everything published as true and have a coherent setting or a playable game, as the world would have been destroyed in prehistory by some drunk guy with high-essence combat charms in a mass combat unit with his pet gerbil, among other myriad stupidities. So why are you taking the Tome of Infallible Divine Revelations stance?
I'd say that it's (b) but (!a) and (probably !c). That is, it's part of the setting, but likely not anything other than an error in the design of the setting, and
shouldn't be part of it (at least as long as the current Railgun Butterfly issue and some others remain). But if it's a mistake, it cannot be just ignored - it needs to be fixed, but that's still a mistaken statement crossed out and written over with a more correct statement, whether in errata, a new edition, or a houserule. But
fixing an erroneous statement is not the same as saying that
there's no statement.
The other half you are missing is the part where in Exalted, everything is Essence. Creation's "substance" is an especially inert and consistent form of magic as drawn out of the chaotic Wyld and stitched into the Present Time, and if you dig deep enough into anything you will find similar ways that magic manifests and ways to utilize it. That's what sets Exalted apart from the majority of your examples, which are simply variants on "what we know, with just enough other stuff to make Weird Shit happen" without the basic level, "withholding appearance, absolutely nothing here is working like you think it does," that Creation is operating from.
A simulated computer reality is still drawing from a "future earth" concept to operate itself. The addition of luminoferous aether is still only an additional law of physics, completely assuming the rest are standard issue. These are piecemeal aspects rooted in stuff you or I have possibly experienced, things we can understand. Meanwhile Exalted says it outright: Creation is made of magic, as a fundamental deviation from what we know, and from the bottom to the top it is a place of myth and legend given shape and form. You or I will never live a narrative life, we can never live in fear of a hungry ghost of our displeased next door neighbor who died in his sleep and was half-eaten by his cat, or ask the stars where to find true love and expect an accurate answer. Creation is an alien Otherwhere of strange sights and sounds, and its rules do not mesh with the rules imposed by any natural laws we understand except those superficially close enough to surprise us when they differ.
I think you're underselling just how fundamental those differences in the laws of nature are. The 'real' world in the Matrix is only superficially similar to ours, and its virtual world is
more similar to ours than its real one: the Matrix world has very different laws of thermodynamics than our world.
And luminoferous æther is not an
additional law of physics: it basically means that Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are wrong/don't exist, and that the fundamental properties of matter are very different from our own, and thus "withholding appearance, absolutely
nothing here is working like you think it does," as you said about Exalted. There may be differences of degree, but make no mistake: swapping out a fundamental law of nature while retaining a humanlike civilisation really does result in "withholding appearance, absolutely
nothing here is working like you think it does".
As for why it is sparse, one part of that is because it is a game book and has to prioritize its time towards concrete, actionable things your characters have the option to get involved in. So outside of marginal notes and whimsical writeups here or there fleshing out the backgrounds behind what we know, it doesn't have Time to dwell on being a physics textbook for an alien and unusual world. It has to be an instructional game guide, a reference manual, and a travelogue all in one.
So the implications of its suggestions often have to be embellished, teased out or creatively patched together where the gaps lay, and sometimes that is simply part of the fun of engaging with it. Not the ages old "a Kid in King Arthur's Court" gimmick of looking for ways to drag out my old highschool notebooks about how to make gunpowder, simply because this latest same-old-earth setting insists that everyone from the dawn of time was too busy throwing left hook fireballs at reality to puzzle out how a musket works.
Oh, yes, "actionable things" are definitely higher priority. That's why I made my GWM comment in a footnote. That being said, I think it would be interesting to play in a campaign of thaumatological inventors, reading the metaphysical laws of a setting and coming up with new ways to use them, probably in some sort of setting where humanity (or other civilisations) are only beginning to explore the world of metaphysics, and where metaphysical phenomena are simple enough to be comprehended by typical
players. Admittedly, such a campaign would probably not fit into Exalted.
