well, the thing with competitive style games is that there will always be those who's only goal is to win at all costs... it's inevitable and they'll always be around.
the main problem with the faq's was;
a) the problem of continuously updating them to take into account newer rules/conflicts and/or new sitiuations that hadn't yet arisen.
b) many, many people were either oblivious to the faq's and/or simply chose to ignore them for various reasons...
c) not all tournaments enforced the faq's meaning that there would be alot of 'bad blood' going about because one tourny would enforce the faq's while another one wouldn't... (even judges within some tournaments would waver on the yes/no question as to the faq's validity!
)
so instead of conintuing on with the mindnumbing task of fixing every little quirk and loophole, jervis brought in the "rule as written" principle to try and allow the dev to sleep at least 3 hours a week...
now, as far as i'm concerned, this doesn't mean that the written rule is absolute! there's still alot of really weird contradictions that common sense dictates shouldn't happen. (such as the psycannon vs. turbo boosting bikers debate!)
instead, the RAW principle is ment to easily and quickly work through the vast majority of little things like tyranid synapse preventing 'Instant Death!' or kill/dies outright wording...
overall, just because we are now to follow RAW doesn't in any way mean we through our common sense and highly respected sporting behavior out the window in favour of getting that tiny advantage!!!
cheers!