That is exactly what I'm saying. I thought I made it pretty clear. Mechanical damage in Forza is pointless. It never affects your race because you simply rewind if you have a serious crash. It's inconsequential. Very few people want realistic consequences for their poor driving or for some other person's poor driving. How many people are actually asking for this feature?
The rest of your post regarding pause button is quite possibly the worst analogy that I've ever heard.
I don't know how you play Forza but I have only ever used rewind when I feel the AI was being a ridiculous punter, which amounts to about 3 times and only in weird pileup situations where the AI was clearly being stupid and having a hard time sorting itself out... never to undo my own mistake... then again you are tlaking to a guy who restrated hundreds of races in GT4 because there was dirty contact between cars but no damage and so I didn't like the fact I was finishing a race damage free when I should have some sort of degraded performance.
The assumption that becuase a feature exists, it will be used in a certain way is entirely presumptuos.
The analogy of the pause button was just fine as long as you realize what I was pointing out is how silly it is to assume that just having a difficulty slider results in no challenge and an undoing of any potential mistakes.
Again you ignore the empirical evidence that is reality in favor of what you cna imagine to support your position.
Let me ask you, if people would always put damage sliders at zero making then useless, why isn't that actually what happens in games with settings sliders? I mean if it was no one would bother putting settings sliders in?
And let me ask you this - when you clearly have a range of people asking for different levels of difficulty, what makes you think given the option they would all choose the same one?
And then let me ask you if, given the opportunity, everyone would choose the easiest option, why is this forum full of people who go out of their way to make the races more difficult on themselves? Why is there the immaculate challenge in the seasonals settings in which people spend hours figuring out really hard setups and then people spend hours trying to complete the races with those settings? That is basically a difficulty setting cranked up that the users had to go out of their way to make, and you just assume that having a slider would mean everyone would choose the easy out?
That's why the pause button analogy is perfect... it's so obivuosly flawed it could only work if you ignore existing real world examples in favor of whatever you can make up in your head to support your ideas.