"Not too tied to reality" brings up a point so many miss these days. It never has to be considered a "choice between" problem.
One or the other is not a requirement, for I enjoy both the toys of my youth for reasons of nostalgia (like Mike and Healey) and model-building to the best of my ability for the creative challenge.
For some reason, the hobby culture won't let you enjoy both at the same time for what they are. Instead, we call them the same thing, resulting in the recent shotgun marriage of three-rail O and scale O in this country and the advent of what to me is a totally unsatisfactory compromise in "highrail" or also known as "three-rail scale/3rs" in America, the latter an oxymoron if truth be told.
I have much more respect for those who have the self confidence to enjoy the toys of their youth as a matter of nostalgia without feeling the pressure to dilute that whimsy with some sort of respectability camouflage that really only works as a matter of social pressure on the modellers to parrot some party line.
I cannot understand why a modeller would dilute realism for an adherence to a toy-train track system on purpose if one's purpose is to model a piece of history or a piece of machinery, any more than I get a toy-train hobbiest diluting the magic and whimsy and nostalgia power of the toys of youth, unless it really is to blend the two into something that is neither for some reason I don't get. Impressionist art, perhaps?
I have to wonder if the reason is simply we cannot respect toy trains and scale modelling as equally legitimate and very different hobbies. Perhaps that in turn comes from the ridiculous false imperative that somehow, in the world of miniature trains, we have to choose between models or toys as a matter of some weird-arse religion, but for some reason by choosing one you automatically spurn the other.
Why are they different in their purest forms? Simply this. Here is an attempt to best of my ability to present a snapshot of history in miniature, the purpose of modelling in a nutshell:
Healey's Marx Commodore
is a piece of history onto itself. That's what I find just as compelling and enjoyable.
The US hobby culture claims them to be one and the same and thus in need of a "blending" into this horrible hermaphrodite called highrail, which preserves the purity and appeal of neither. I find it much more appealing to keep them as two very different interests and enjoy both immensely in their unadulterated forms.