tgreene: Define "gamesmanship".
It's hard to see this particular example as gamesmanship, since it is clearly the RAW and clearly as the authors intended, too.
"What is the point óf having a restricted zone at all?" is easily answered: because if it wasn't there, then LH really would be able to squirrel their way apst any unit and through any small gap, with zero chance of stopping them. Something which you (quite rightly) don't like the idea of. So there you go, that's the point of it.
Personally I wouldn't have a problem if the rules were more restrictive - i.e. as suggested, you must keep at least half a base width in front. But that's not what they say, and in fact the difference between that and having to keep a gnat's todger of the BG in front is not that much. Slightly less than 20mm. Doesn't seem like a gamebreaker to me.
I get far more irritated about what happens when you have two BGs doing the pinning, something you clearly haven't played enough to discover yet
As pointed out already, there will be things in any ruleset you don't like (unless, presumably, you wrote the rues yourself
). It's not uncommon to see wargamers play a set of rules for a long time, get used to all its little foibles, and stop worrying about them. But then try another ruleset and the new little foibles, along with all the other differences between the way the rules play, seem much more of a big deal.
I wasn't that impressed by FoG when I first played it, and I still think it is a little simplistic in some ways compared to the rulesets I had played previously...but strangely, here I am playing FoG almost exclusively now.