@thoughtpunks I don't know who you were spending your time talking to, but when I talk about TTRPGs, I often talking about making hypotheses, testing hypotheses, and then turning those tests back into functioning systems which I can speak about in a clear and concise manner.
We've been talking about the difference between designing a game and playing a game forever. That's nothing new. You don't need ludology to do that. You just need one round of play testing. It happens naturally.
As for models – models are hard. We don't have a unified field theory in physics, sociology is an absolute mess when it comes to trying to build models (and one could argue the entire field is just building one model after another and discarding them as quickly as possible), so it's not surprising that game models are muddled. It's an engineering field; approximations and rules of thumb are often good enough.
If you thought you could do better with theoretical application, you would be doing that. You would be writing about that. You would be discussing that. And you would be succeeding as a result of doing that.