That’s basically what I decided, well one of the things, when I was deciding how to feel with this question. I love the idea story-wise for so many CRPGs, but I just can’t fucking get into the gameplay of old style isometric games like that. Like the story and possibilities of Baldur’s Gate sounds so up my alley, but it just sucks to play to me (I can’t take it for even like half an hour). Pillars of Eternity falls in a similar boat. Tyranny I’m fighting through slowly. But all of those, the entire subgenre of it, it’s the gameplay I can’t stand. Interactive fiction solved that problem: it’s a “game”, with plenty of interactivity and choice (on the ones I like), without being bogged down by dull or painfully tedious gameplay. It does it even better, honestly (well, has the potential to), because you don’t have the excuse “oh but the budget doesn’t allow for a female protagonist” or whatever other shit because there’s no visual or auditory elements, and various details of how your character looks can actually be acknowledged. It’s just a far better medium for a story (books is better books thank games? shocker, I know), and that is my main draw to RPGs. It obviously fails on longevity and, well, gameplay, and the immersion can’t compete with first person games (at least for my aphantasia self), but it’s a great medium that takes the best parts of a game and a novel, in my opinion.
So, uh, to answer the question of the post I like both. So long as it’s still a “book” you interact with/within, and not a “game” you read like the management or stay heavy ones; it’s cool to do I guess, but that’s focusing on the weaknesses of the medium and ignoring the strengths, not that text-based games can’t be a thing of course but that’s not “interactive fiction”.
And just to speak on a thing I saw in this topic, I also dislike, maybe even hate, having cut-ins that don’t involve the main character. It just bugs me so much. Like I just wanna keep it to what the MC knows or is interacting with, for immersion’s sake if nothing else. It’s totally fine to have shit happening in the background that you and the protagonist aren’t privy to. Keeps them ffrom impossibly just happening to have meta knowledge that someone’s planning something, or about to ambush them, or whatever it is.
Sorry for the long rambling. I’m pretty bad with that…