Orion-
I respectfully disagree. Now, I'll be the first to call bullshit on a DM thats obviously acting as God and purposely smiting you, but I'm also the one to make a bridge when everyone else wants to jump. Maybe its because the game that I enjoyed the most was run by a DM who was constantly set at the "Ultra Hard" setting. You launch a fireball in the woods? Well, its autumn, and it hasn't rained in a while.... 10% (made up statistic) chance for a forest fire.... *evil gleam in DM's eye*. Yeah, that happened. Wand of Summon Monster IV got me a giant owl for 7 rounds..... 42 charges later I was out of the forest. I don't play games because I don't have anything else to do, I play games because I want to win. How do you "win" in D&D? By surviving, and prospering. By retiring as an Archmage in a tower somewhere, or whatever.
Here's another one - After making it through the forest fire, and the hellacious magical swamp of doom, and then the undead city of doom, we had found a doorway leading into a mountain. Said gigantic doorway was guarded by 6, count 'em, 6 Helmed Horrors. Our party had a Wizard/Loremaster, an Arcane Trickster, and a Fighter. We'd already fought one of those things, and it nearly TPK'ed us. How the hell were we gonna get through that? Well, there happened to be a Collosal Gorgonhydra (I think thats the name, its outta FR) living in the City of Hellish Doom, too. One of the other players (The DM from the tourney game) came up with a brilliant idea. He went invisible, flew near the creature's nest, and Major Imaged a big freaking cow. (Moo, moo moo. Moo?) Led that fucker straight back to the Helmed Horrors. We had set up 4 rooms in buildings around the courtyard that we could teleport to, in case things got kinda hairy. After an epic battle, all the Horrors and the Hydrathing lay dead, and we were all 5k XP richer. =) That was when the adventure really took off.
One more thing, Orion. I named the thread "Twarting your DM" in jest, yes. But I still think thats effectively what you're doing. When j0lt tosses three pages of notes into the trash, thats twarted. It doesn't mean the DM has to be upset, quite the opposite, s/he should be thrilled to have players that actually think instead of just blast/bash/roll their way through things. I'm juss' sayin~