High magic would conventionally represent magic perhaps similar to the way we have technology - mages are very common and it's an everyday occurence, like magic items routinely being household items or facilities.
Which is --
I reiterate -- exactly where and how Forgotten Realms actually is.
You're the one who keeps acting as if mundane and common magical items simply don't exist, and focusing exclusively on martial shit
you know damn well are the
minority of all magical items to exist in a game or a universe.
At the low magic end you'd have something like the Iliad or Tolkein's LoTR era Middle Earth. There are a handful of wizards and other demigod types, some of the really powerful elves, and after that there's basically no magic except maybe a few odds and sods that can be discovered or gifted.
Tell me you don't actually know how magic works in Middle-Earth without saying you don't actually know how magic works in Middle-Earth. The "magic" to which you're referring is only one form of it, and not the most prevalent or impactful by a
wide margin to the point it's not even comparable.
Hint: genuinely-spoken oaths and curses in Tolkien's legendarium are every bit as magical and powerful as Gandalf's flaming pine cones, and they are far more widely-used and powerful (even inadvertently) if not more subtle. You would do well to yourself to re-read LotR with that in mind, as to who said what to and of whom, and to what end.
...the peasantry who will basically never own a magic (non-consumable) item...
It's a little early for the goalposts to migrate south for the winter.
...the ability to ignore difficult terrain is shared by the broom...
Yes, at the disadvantage of being potentially knocked off it and taking falling damage, plus that of whatever may have caused the difficult terrain in the first place. Something that stupid chair
does not have, and in fact
resists.
...the upshot of damage resistance just functionally translates to 'you aren't going to be de-facto removed from combat and derail the session because an enemy got a lucky hit on your mount'. The upshot f it is simply that for the purposes of combat, the enemy will not be treated as targeting your mount. And you want to talk about replicating a feat?
Yeah let's talk about
replicating a feat. That's a
second feat the chair obviates, thanks for reminding me!
About effects equivalent to a 4th level spell? Limited Levitation? Again: 9TH LEVEL
overland flight! Every day. Easily available at level 1-4, by your count. No spell slot, no skill, no class restrictions, "without even requiring attunement". You just get that daily.
Hey, remember when I mentioned
Phantom Steed? You sure seem to have forgot I mentioned Phantom Steed. It's
only a third-level spell that provides unlimited movement twice that of the broom, provided it can be ritual cast (and you can ritual cast a spell on horseback). You'd have done a better job arguing about
that than a 5th (not 9th) level spell that's not even in 5e. Something you might have noticed in your anger, that you couldn't even be arsed to link to a D&D 3.5 SRD and instead went for
Pathfinder 1st edition.
You want to be taken seriously about this when you can't even get the game we're talking about right?
...when it's an open secret that 1) easy access to flight is a gamechanger (arguably one of the most powerful abilities in the game)...
Yes, it is powerful. No, it is
not a game changer. Flight is one of the most common abilities in the entire damn game, as evidenced by the sheer number of PC races which can do it innately at 1st level, and it's on the DM to
account for it from the onset.
...that the GM needs to rebalance the entire campaign around...
See earlier commentary about shitty DM's. DM's not knowing how to account for flight, and inadvertently design unviable campaigns and encounters, isn't a "me" problem.
Maybe if they'd spent half as much time reading and internalizing rules and settings, as they did virtue signaling on social media...
...The money scaling goes back to Greyhawk which again, has +3 weapons being things of legend. There's been a general creep in the magic of D&D over the editions, and part of that has come with changes in the default setting...
Honestly I blame 3rd edition, which tried to standardize prices in accordance to caster and spell levels opposed to tailor cost to effect and utility. Case in point, those magical soaps with baked-in Cleanse/Prestidigitation effects that cleaned anything washed with them regardless what dirtied it or how dirty it was, which in past editions sold for a silver or two and were available in any adventuring market, but under 5e rules would go for 25-100gp apiece and "had" to be special ordered.
Then there was that infinite soap bar, and that magical candle that never burned down and only snuffed with a command word, too. You know, because
someone specified
non-consumable magic items. Those were only like a couple gold because regardless of being magic, they had trivial effects absent real adventuring utility and basically just replicated a cantrip.
And, there was that magical scroll and document case that behaved identically to handy haversack and protected its contents from the elements. It was only like 5gp due to how limited its utility was, but again, under new editions' rules it would cost the same as a full common item. Meanwhile, in 5e instead of common magical items with genuine utility like that, we get...the cloak of billowing. For some reason.
...caused a written "nerfing" to the magic of FR because prior to 5e...
Which, I'll add, only happened because the morons at WotC implemented bounded accuracy without the first clue how to balance it with magical items. So, they just calculated CR assuming PC's had
no magic items (level comparability be damned), with a "baseline low-magic setting" default, and then to cover for their own incompetence retconned Toril to be a lower-magic setting than it actually is, which
their own later publications contradict.
Reading some of these modules published in 5th edition
really shows off how big a joke
that is. Hell, one of the first encounters in SKT allows for a good- or neutral-aligned arcane PC to adopt a
tressym.