Changing the "Caster beats Mundane" paradigm

[Pleh]

But even then, you're only looking at wizard spells, and not even all of them. Only 3e makes the assumption that anyone can learn wizardry if they're smart enough (which most aren't). None of the other editions did. Coincidentally, 3e is the biggest offender in the "casters rule, martials drool" category...

My setting follows the basic assumption of 5e, where being able to have spell slots is rare--a tiny fraction of humans can learn a few spells (ritual caster/magic initiate feat) without being dedicated to that trade; higher level wizards are vanishingly rare and most wizards who train their entire lives are never able to learn the higher level spells.

That is, your assumptions are the odd ones out here, not mine.

Irrelevant to my original assertion that spellcasting was scientific.

Even if you are a divine caster, do no magic of your own, and just pray that cosmic beings do magic on your behalf, your character still learned how to do that either through exploratory discovery or you were handed down teaching that came from a knowledgable authority.

If you use inborn sorcery, you used trial and error to learn to summon its power on command and to not accidentally cast spells or you were taught how to do so. Even magical creatures that use magic intuitively operate by instinct, which can also be examined and explored.

There is some science to even the deepest, most abstract forms of art.

Even if magic is totally wild and chaotic, it can still be described by mortals with statistics mathematics, "do this for the best chancrof getting the spell you want."

Science represents techniques people have developed through practice, study, and experimentation to create reproducible techniques.

I don't care how you flavor them. If your characters can cast the exact spell they want exactly when they want it, there will be some teaching around this handed from caster to caster as at least a "best practices." There is the science.

Look at it another way. Spellcasting is where mortals interface with magic. Anything mortals interact with, they can examine. Anything they can examine to create reproducible techniques is science.

There's no way spellcasting is anything but science. At worst, it is a loose science that describes fuzzy trends.