Someone asked on Discord: When do you choose to ignore/alter certain rules in game? E.g. in Feng Shui 2, if all characters are using the same weapon, what happens if you ignore the "reload" rolls for simplicity? And would you know if ignoring affects it until after you play?"
My answer:
I try to always give the rules as written a go ("RAW", in the lingo), even if there's something I'm fairly sure I won't be fond of in the rules. The quote by jazz violinist Stephàne Grapelli is often in my mind: "I play the sheet music through once as it was written, out of respect for the composer."
Respect aside, I do that because even in the simplest, most transparent systems, there are often unforeseen consequences to pulling out one thing pr another. That said, it's generally easier with lighter systems: in Cthulhu Dark, you can see right away that removing Insight would eliminate the jeopardy of re-rolling. But Blades in the Dark is infamously difficult to tinker with because the knock-on effects of a mechanic will often play out maybe an hour later in the game.
When I have decided to elide a rule or subsystem, I look for "interesting decisions".
The game designer Greg Costikyan proposed this as the core of good game design, and while I won't be dying on that hill, I've not yet found a case that contradicts this idea in practice. He gave the example of a board game where, each turn, you have two options -- but one of them is always better than the other. The player nominally makes a decision but it isn't "interesting". The opposite but equally uninteresting is when your options are roughly equal in desirability but don't really make much difference. "We go through the left door!" "You enter the Bad Guy's sanctum, which the right-hand door also leads to."
So all that is a prelude to saying FS2's reloading rule is a prime candidate to consider cutting. I think your mention of "if everyone has the same weapon" is insightful, as it alludes to where this kind of thing 100% does get interesting: my high-damage weapon is out of ammo, but my enemy can still attack. Do I take the risk of reloading, or do I attack now with my less effective backup option? And if everyone is equally armed, that question has less teeth. Particularly in the FS2 genre. There are definitely games where it'd be a whole thing though.
Coming specifically to FS2, we have done the "play it through as the composer wrote it" in that we played a whole bunch of times and basically never had a fight last long enough to ever reload.
But as a general idea, my answer is to ask "Does this element create the kind of interesting decisions this game is about?"
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