World-Building Turn-Offs

[jseah]

I just find it vastly more immersion-breaking to equate having more RL technology with making progress and hamfistedly try to shove it into a setting instead of incrementally improving what's already there, magic and magical things.

If players ask why there isn't more apparent progress in D&D settings, just ask them what you would do with your time if you were a genius in a world where magic worked: would you rather be credited with the invention of the steam engine and the handgun, or the spell engine and the owlbear?

Well, I agree with you on the RL technology part, not every magic system will lead to technologies that look anything at all like RL. But I would disagree on the lack of impact of technology.

One of the very first things I have seen players do (and been that player at times) is to find a way to automate things. Wizards are expensive. People are expensive (or if not, prone to revolt).

You find a way around the need to have people do things to get things done (or reduce the number of people needed or reduce the quality of people needed).
That is the essence of technology. Requiring less people for the same result. (same number of people for better results is the same thing)

In a pseudo-medieval magical world, one of the first things I would be trying to do is to make a cart that goes without a horse or a wizard. This of course assumes that magic is automatable at all, which in some systems isn't.
If it isn't automatable, I have no interest and would set about finding some other way to get rid of that horse.