Hardly. Everyone likes to pretend "they're just in it for the story", but in my experience, they just want to give themselves advantages in my experience.
> And I note you skipped the Locate City nuke
3.5 is known to be pretty busted. I'm not aware of this sequence of events being possible in Pathfinder, which is my preferred crunch.
There are certainly busted things in Pathfinder (see Summoner). But upon recognition, I talk with the player and we work something out. (see Summoner Unchained).
If something is busted and truly too much for the system to handle, I stomp down as dungeon master. That's my duty above all, to ensure fairness in the game.
Meh, at some point the only solution is "get better players". I've had if anything the opposite problem, with players who enjoy doing a dramatic death scene so much that they'd rush to these moments of sacrifice and loss even when they weren't really necessary. Improv-oriented players as I know them enjoy telling a story and are there for that; the problem you get is every player trying to hog the narrative spotlight (often with their moments of tragic suffering) rather than every player trying to be more powerful than the others.
This is very much not an improv-player attitude IME; improv-players mostly want in-genre things to happen. When you simulate the nuts and bolts, you're more likely to attract the kind of player who sees that as an abstract puzzle to optimize and does so.
(And I note you skipped the Locate City nuke, I guess because that does work in-game? Fundamentally rule-based magic systems tend to be exploitable, because if you want the kind of things that fictional magic does in-genre to be possible, you have to make your magic be able to do impossible things, but the rules that allow that will tend to allow other impossible things which are more min-maxable).
> People who mess with shenanigans are the problem, including peasant railgunners.
Sure. My point is that adding more detailed mechanics does nothing to deter that; quite the opposite.