This is my first experience with Gnome Stew, and while he seems like a nice, reasonably articulate guy ... but I'm also roundly unimpressed.
He views there as one acceptable avenue of what he terms min-maxing: using the system to protect your character. Seeing this as the be all end all is bizarre if nothing else. Gnome Stew references Savage Worlds, a system with bennies to give PCs some measure of plot armor. By Gnome Stew's argument, this is not an appropriate venue for min-maxing. So, by that logic, am I somehow doing something wrong when my Deadlands gunslinger character takes the Edges Two-Fisted and Ambidextrous, which let him competently fire two guns like I want him to? Have I somehow misbehaved?
Of course not. I've conceived of a perfectly reasonable concept (indeed, that build is in the SW core book) and used the game system to achieve it. There is a strong element of character optimization to this example -- I'm not sure if these talents count as "realistic" in Gnome Stew's estimation, they were selected to be effective -- although in many circles this would also just be called, y'know, playing a role-playing game. Indeed, you can extend this logic to something absurd like asking why I bothered to get a good Shooting skill for the aforementioned gunslinger character.
In the end, his apology misses the broader point of what character optimization (or more generally system literacy) can and often does. Further, he seems to privilege the idea of protecting a PC, as if that's somehow special or more worthwhile than optimizing a character to realize a concept or do something interesting that the system might not handle in an obvious way. And, perhaps as a result of this, his conclusions boil down to "don't be a dick" and the usual "talk to the player" or "counter optimize" recommendations that have been bandied about for decades.
