Yes, but those people were clearly referencing Clarke.
--and I disagree with them.
Advanced technology should look like magic, but advanced magic should look pretty magical, simply because no one would develop a technology so inconvenient, dangerous or bizarre.
Gigantic energy collectors should have swirling vortexes of unsafe workplace condition, and the guys maintaining it should work with kitten blood and carved bones, for exactly this reason.
Exploring magic to the degree that it just becomes plain old science is where Eternal Darkness went wrong, and I don't want to see Dwarf Fortress do that. Channeling too much magic in one fortress should result in HFS like events, or even just less serious but equally interesting events, like magical beings, spawning inside your energy concentrators.
Cultists should try to free any chained demons that you keep around to power your array of magically powered deathtraps.
Having to monkey with sliders every time you cast a spell would be to much hassle. I don't even know how the words themselves should be selected. As your word library grows, that's going to become a pain.
I'd like to see high quality amulets become useful as energy storage devices, so player wizards aren't totally helpless away from their towers.
Early on, words and spells would have to be assigned through the raws, until the system grows robust enough to support magic systems made from random words. But eventually, I'd like to see a system where you can just specify how many nouns and verbs a civ gets, and ones appropriate to their race and religion would get chosen from the list.
I agree Dwarves should get runes, humans should get words.
I dunno about the other races. The various powers they worship might give them a few words, but I don't see them as literate enough to use runes.
There needs to be some way of expanding your wizard's repertoire or even your civ's, besides stealing them or befriending all of the various races. Intelligent megabeasts and gods selling words for quests would make sense, but you'd want a way to make those quests extra hard, and require significant faction standing with them, just to get the quest.
There also needs to be a worldgen option for the total number of words that are available in a given world, if word based magic is used in that world, that way new words can be easy to find or very rare, depending on the sort of world they are in. Words should be more costly if there are more of them.