Possibly. But I'm trying to think of a game that can match 4e's Skill Challenges.
From the little experience I've had with it, I would look at the Spycraft "chase" mechanic (which really applied to everything other than straight combat).

I admit that my point wasn't the clearest, because I'm arguing two things at the same time, first that hard rules >> DM guidelines and second that 5e maneuvers shouldn't take inspiration from page 42. The first part of the argument is where I'm saying that page 42 isn't rules, it's guidelines, and as long as the expected outcomes of a player's improvised actions are that fuzzy, there's not point in improvising when you already have powers that do stuff; 4e has all the deterministic outcomes you describe, but just for powers, not for improvised tactics.
I would argue that player guidelines >> hard rules >> DM Guidelines, though the player guidelines I'm thinking of would arguably be rules. I'm thinking like that liked "pick your power" fighter, that players would be given a set of options to modify their classes' particular "Hit it with a [magical] stick" power to perform any number of things that they can imagine, with some basic rules for combining those items and for creating new actions that the designers did not consider. That is, there shouldn't be a "Things the Rules Don't Cover" page or chapter, because the rules should be providing the players and the GM the tools and formulas to build everything. Pre-spelled out powers and abilities are just pre-made applications of those rules.

The second and slightly more granular is per-die damage reduction: DR 1 means -1 damage per die, DR 10 means -10 damage per die, so you can go from "slightly resistant" to "almost immune" without either rendering DR useless or rendering certain weapons useless. This scales very well and gives you that "must be this tall to ride" effect since DR 6 or 7 would take care of commoners with Str 10 and d6 weapons, but it would require a bit more math on the players' part which isn't necessarily a good thing.
What if each level of DR subtracted one die from the damage roll starting with the smallest die size? Force the casters to burn spells since they don't have expertise dice to add dice to their weapon damage.