Miss 4e D&D

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To get a little more context, here is the relevant quote bit from the DMG 1:

It’s also a good idea to think about other options the characters might exercise and how these might influence the course of the challenge. Characters might have access to utility powers or rituals that can help them. These might allow special uses of skills, perhaps with a bonus. rituals in particular might grant an automatic success or remove failures from the running total.

That's it, three offhand sentences, and no attempts to integrate this despite the several pages dedicated to examples later on. That's why I call it lip service.

In general I'd recommend anyone interested in the ongoing discussion here to read the DMG2 on skill challenges. The initiative thing is gone already by then, of course, because it's stupid and no one likes it, but besides the touch-ups to the rules it also has a ton more discussion and advice than DMG1 offers, and I would argue it makes it clear that the straitjacket interpretation of the rules is not intended, but that it's a structure for the DM to embellish as they see fit.

Before I launch into another essay, I just wanted to say I agree with your second comment here -- I don't particularly care if 4e took a year (or two or three) to get SCs right. If they eventually did make a flexible, useful game structure, the designers deserve credit. That said, I disagree with the idea that the DMG2 rules are good representative of 4e SCs.

First, the DMG2 is not the first word on skill challenges (that's the DMG1, with fixed initiative, forced action, lip service to rituals), nor is it the final word on skill challenges (that's the Dungeon Master's Book and the RC, with mandatory Advantages and nothing on utilities, rituals, circumvention). It's hard to say that the DMG2 rules are the true intended experience, because the designers chose to take this flexibility out of the system when given the chance to revise SCs again. As far any of us can tell, they may have considered automatic ritual successes just as much of a mistake as SC initiative.

Beyond that, the DMG2 applied a few of its own straightjacket requirements, arguably some of the most difficult straightjackets of all. In the DMG2, the designers realized SCs were pretty boring, so in the DMG2 guidance they ended up adding a ton of extra work for the DM:

Restriction 1

Each skill check in a challenge should accomplish one of the following goals:

• Introduce a new option that the PCs can pursue, a path to success they didn't know existed.
• Change the situation, such as by sending the PCs a new location, introducing a new NPC, or adding a complication.
• Grant the players a tangible consequence for the check's success or failure (as appropriate), one that influences their subsequent decisions.

This actually inserts a dramatically larger amount of effort into designing SCs. No longer should a DM assume that the game will take "about 5 skill checks" like kyoryu does, where we roll and the DM does a quick narration, then we roll again. Instead, every skill check must change the context of the scenario in some significant way, even if one of the PCs is choosing to just use Nature three times in a row.

Restriction 2

The characters should always be the active party in a skill challenge. [...] It's best illustrated with an example.

The characters need to escape from a group of pursuers. It's easy to default to have the PCs making Endurance or Athletics checks to see if they can stay ahead of the chase, but that situation pushes them into a passive role. The guards are the active party: They chase the PCs, and the PCs make checks to avoid capture.

In this example, you might allow PCs to make checks to outrun the guards, but that should be one option among many. Even then, it's best to flavor that option with a sense that the PCs are the ones creating obstacles that the guards can 't overcome. An Athletics check doesn't mean the PC is simply running really fast. Instead, it represents a character dodging through a crowded street with ease while the guards struggle to push through.

Placing characters in the active role has an important effect on your design, your presentation, and the players' engagement. It forces the players to step up and make plans rather than sit back and react to your NPCs. It also compels you to create multiple paths and options. When the PCs are the passive group in a challenge, it's too easy to allow logic to dictate that one repeated skill check is the best way to plow through the challenge.

DMG2 SC rules require actually tossing out large swaths of what I consider common skill uses, because it leads to "logic [which] dictate[s] that one repeated skill check is the best", i.e. the DM should obfuscate the mechanics of the skill challenge to prevents players from flogging a single skill over and over when it would be mathematically optimal. Note that the result from the players side is mechanically the same (they roll Athletics), but the DM has to do extra work (they must define what Athletics is in an active way, or they shouldn't include the skill in the SC).

Restriction 3
The DMG2 also adds a bunch of structures on top of existing SCs to specifically handle certain scenarios. For example, if characters can "succeed in one of two ways", you are supposed to use a Branching Skill Challenge, which requires tracking two separate exclusive goals. For example, say you're in a diplomatic negotiation. If you praise a politician, bribe someone, write a moving speech, etc, you must pick one of the branching success conditions and apply your success to that (or the DM must do it for you). When one of the goals is met, the other goal is ignored, no matter how many successes were earned on it. If that seems totally ridiculous, consider that "diplomatic negotiation" is the first idea they bring up for a Branching Skill Challenge.

But the Examples Tho...
Now weirdly, the DMG2 examples ignore a lot of the straightjackets (and sometimes ignore the rules entirely). Here are a few examples:

• The Rushing River example has a bunch of passive checks like "see the boat ahead" and "stay alert".
• Chasing the Bandits has skills where the PCs "[concentrate] on running as fast as possible" or "move more slowly" but explicitly prevents the PCs from separating from each other, removing any tangible consequences (aside from "guess incorrectly that this is a Branching Skill Challenge and waste your skill checks")
• Moving Through Suderham throws away the core pacing mechanic of tracking successes (in fact it does basically nothing with successes). It just requires PCs to make checks based on whatever their goals are, with escalating penalties for failures. You might wonder why this is considered a Skill Challenge when it eschews the most fundamental element of Skill Challenges, and... the book doesn't really answer that question.

I think if we ignore the actual skill challenge advice in the DMG1, DMG2, DMB, and RC, and base our understanding of 4e SCs purely off the DMG2's example section, it sort of implies a combination of two flexible design tools: progress clocks and level-to-DC tables. And I'll agree that this is a good combination of things. The 4e DMG2 skill challenges, despite many of them being pretty boring, can be used to infer some useful gameplay systems.

But what I don't get is why this "makes it clear" what the designers were thinking. It requries (1) assuming the 4e SC rules were canonically correct in 2009, despite being overwritten within the year, and (2) ignoring the rules themselves, which at times contradicted the contents of the examples. I'll gladly praise Moving Through Suderham for being cool, but I don't think it represents Real(tm) SCs. I'd argue it showcases the weakness of SCs, because the designers had to perform a massive surgery on their core non-combat tool (getting rid of complexity, success-tracking, and XP rewards!) to create a compelling gameplay structure.

Bringing it Full Circle
I've harped on this point a couple times, but I think it bears repeating: there are already gameplay structures that deserve more credit for these innovations. Fate 2e had an actual, flexible gameplay structures in its Static and Dynamic Challenges back in 2003, when WotC was still working on D&D 3e books. BitD distilled the success and failure tracking systems into the far more flexible Progress Clock system 6-7 years ago. Whether you want to credit the progenitor of this idea or the game that did it best, 4e isn't on the list either way, and its legacy is sullied by the 3-4 functional variations on the system which ranged from literally unusable to frustratingly narrow by-the-book.