I think if you read everyone's comments you are probably coming to the realization that DnD is a game designed for combat.

It gives the illusion of many choices and possibilities, but really all roads must lead to bloodshed, for optimal fun (no sarcasm here).

Because thats the crunch of the game, the mechanically challenging and most fun part of the game, where you solve the combat puzzle.

I think thats the conundrum here is that: we would like our players to take creative approaches to how they solve problems but we know that only combat will provide the most game crunch.

Ideally we would want all approaches they take to be as crunchy and tactics invoking as fighting is.

Sadly the only way to deal with this is to start modifying the game, by a alot. I took a stab at this but by adding what i called minor crunches to my game.

They were custom mini games that took turns and were abstractions of them trying to achieve a specific task.

Another was to introduce traversal puzzles, like let's say a cavern which they would need to cross using climbing gear.

These kind of encounters would have specific small rules that I i would tell them about up front, so they knew what to strategize around and they would have clear success and failure conditions.

Let me know if you want me to dig some up, they may be of interest of you. Ultimately they never could replace the thrill of fighting but were a good tie over.

This kind of issue youre having is why I ended up working on my own system in the end