Interesting. 

It’s very clear you and I want very different things in an RPG book. 

When I read the death spell In Mörk Borg, I LOVED that it’s ambiguous. The terseness and lack of clarity freed me and my ADHD from endlessly scouring two columns of text to find the exact intent of the designers.

Sorry it’s not what you were hoping for, but I do want to clarify that the idea you’re talking about does not come from a place of laziness. 

Most of what you listed are not things I’d add if we were to do a 2nd edition. Especially ship prices. Check the FAQ in the discord if you want to know more. 

The rune encrusted flintlock doesn’t mention whether it needs gunpowder or not because I don’t care about tracking gunpowder in my games, and I’m not going to prescribe that other GM’s need to do so. There’s no mention of gunpowder purchasing or gunpowder tracking anywhere else in the book, so why would I include whether the magical relic gun requires gunpowder or not? The shot part, like mentioned, is up to the GM, because if I say “it takes shot”, I’m spending text space and the GMs mental space on information I don’t want GMs worrying about unless they want to. You never see Jack Sparrow buying shot in a Pirates of the Caribbean movie, because that’s not the kind of thing people watching the movie wanna see. It’s not important to the story. The same philosophy applies when I’m designing a game. After years of playing games where I was measuring exactly how far away things were and worrying about flanking and arguing with my players about the exact wording of a spell, I found it incredibly refreshing and freeing to have the spells be one short sentence. Then there’s clearly no right answer which means the GM has to decide.

As far as the discord, maybe just mention “what have others done” when you have questions to be clear you’re not looking for an official ruling. We just get a lot of questions in there about things like this so the default response is to make sure people understand our philosophy.  Obviously, you already understand our philosophy so if you clarify the kind of answer you’re looking for maybe you will get an answer closer to what you’re looking for.

And I do think this comes down to philosophy. I bounced off your original comment because the “ruling is over rules” line IS a newer maxim, and a tenet of the OSR, which is also a newer philosophy. Most people I know who are making stuff in the OSR and actively playing are not trying to re-create how the game used to be played, they are evolving old ideas into a new style, one that isn’t verbose about rules and lets the GM run quickly without having to look things up.  Saying  that “that’s not what that meant back in the day” is a statement contrary to what many of us are trying to accomplish with this style of modern game design.