>Treat its universalizing language/imperatives the same way you'd treat "Dada Means Nothing"
In other words, it was purposedly overdramatized and made sound more radical than you really believe, right?
>In any event, I think the Chesterton's Fence reference is not quite the right one, since I don't think either you or I are really confused about what HP is for
The key part in this case is "Rather, they should be able to show how tearing things down constitutes an actual improvement." Not just "by not using X we would be forced to be more creative about how we do things". I think the person who would said that would need to show actual alternatives for X and that these alternatives are improvement over using X. Otherwise, it's like cutting budget of a film in hope that it will become better due to creators of the film being forced to become more creative with their more limited means.
Theoretically, it can indeed happen, but other outcomes are much more likely:
A) People use their limited means more creatively, but this doesn't make film better compared with alternative world where the budget wasn't cut.
B) People fail to be creative and just fallback on cheaper and more primitive techniques and make shorter, less polished, film
The problem is that HP are so universal construct, that it's very unlikely that there is possible equally universal construct that could replace HP AND be an improvement. At the very best you could show that in such and such specific scenarios a game is better without HP for such and such reasons. So you can't dismantle HP universally if you can't replace it universally.
>the response to the "imagine how limiting hands are" argument would be "imagine ways of interacting with the world that are not bound by what hands alone can do" which would lead you to, you know, hammers and axes and tools and writing implements and so on.
You provided quite ironic examples for alleged results of thinking outside "use-hands" worldview. Because they still need hands to useful, you still use your hands, just indirectly. So, say, sentient handless humanoid aliens wouldn't came up with idea of, say, hammer, at the least not in the form that humans invented, which shows that hammers created by humans weren't created outside of "use-hands" worldview.
I would rather extend "imagine ways of interacting with the world that are not bound by what hands alone can do" by adding "and if you fail to make an improvement, fall back to hands-using worldview". This way this turns into a creative procedure that won't make things worse (in the worst case) and can even make things better (in the best case). If we replace "hands" with arbitrary X, we can use this procedure in general to increase amount of originality in our projects.