There's a bunch of discourse on my tl about respect and curiosity towards game design and I agree generally speaking but also I think for me there's an element of optimism to statements like these in that probably 70% of the games I've ever worked on were, to quote the excellent Karla Zimonja, "drunk-walking towards completion" and sometimes you really do end up with a design cobbled together from a bunch of goals you're not sure how to execute, a bunch of decisions that might have been good ideas separately or at the time and now you're stuck with them. Treating that as always intentional and artistic is well meaning but well and truly, sometimes game development is in fact a polite disaster that somehow turns out okay (or doesn't)
i design games mostly improvisationally and by acting on random impulses but i don't think "the designer was probably doing random stuff because they felt like it" is a very interesting lens for analysis, even if it is the truth of the matter. "they did it because they ran out of time or money" is perhaps interesting if you are discussing the production, but it don't think it leads to many interesting conclusions about design beyond "maybe this design is half-baked and can be improved somehow". for me personally, the point of assuming designers operate with intent and deliberate craft is not because it's actually true, but because it helps me draw better conclusions about design, and crucially, inspires me to consider new approaches to design in my own work meow
I think “whether the designer meant to or not” is less interesting “how does one element of the design affect the whole”
