I've been thinking a lot about the Ladder, and what draws me to it as a solution for a combat system, and I think a little detour into Guild Ball may be illustrative.
So Guild Ball uses free movement. This means that a model doesn't have to be aligned to any grid; distances are given in inches and are generally tool-measured to ensure choices made are valid. This is very common on the wargames side; it works better with the hobbycraft focus most of them have.
Guild ball is also a very complex game and a lot of the skill in it has to do with execution - since ranges are binary, placing even slightly too far away or too close to something can have drastic consequences later in the game, and skill is expressed by being able to identify when and how those ranges matter. Because of this complexity, a perennial topic of discussion of the game was if there were ways to simplify teaching the game, and one I was a proponent of (with caveats - see below) is called "Hexball". More or less, find a way to move the game from free movement to some kind of gridded game, probably on hexes.
The reason I thought this would work for the stated goal (that is, making boardstate easier to parse and thus teach without removing skill from the game) is that I don't think the execution skill of proper placement actually does much to improve the game. People who are very good at it will necessarily have little variation in the kind of moves they make in a given situation, and for those making wildly incorrect moves that will still be the case whether gridded or not. The middle case that is eliminated by the presence of the grid is exactly the case we'd be trying to remove - places where tiny placement mistakes have enormous but difficult-to-see downstream consequences. Removing those cases would increase the number of people playing at the highest levels by putting more focus on strategic and tactical decision-making instead of physical execution, which in turn would improve the experience of higher tables by making them more competetive. Plus, some kind of grid would have positive side-effects, like removing the need for a bunch of measurement widgets.
This solution isn't without downsides; some numbers on characters would need to change, as would base sizes, probably resulting in the need to rebase models; most physical accessories would need modification or replacement, or be completely obviated; and the community as a whole likes free-movement. It would almost certainly require a whole new edition of the game, and would risk alienating some of the game's most ardent supporters. In the end it was mostly a thought experiment, but I still think that, given the premise you want to make the game easier to teach, there isn't really anything that approaches Hexball's ratio between its high improvement to new player experience and its low impact on high-level decision-making.
I bring this up in relation to the Ladder because the context it arises in is rather similar. Gridded is the standard for RPGs that have any amount of tactical skirmish focus for a variety of historical reasons, but it puts constraints on the ability to play. I like grid conceptually for Guild Ball because all pitches have the same dimensions and base features, and you can use terrain models for variation; RPGs have a much wider variety of possible settings. Making those maps was a constant annoyance for me in my games; I could doodle them on something or use tiles, but then they're ugly and take session-time unless I pre-draw them; I can use pre-existing maps, but then I have to find them and scale them, both of which can be difficult or time-consuming; or I can pull out all the stops to make a beautiful map but spend an inordinate amount of time preparing it. For my solo games I print out small maps and use wet-erase markers instead of minis, which is both fast and decent-looking, but it's tiny and so only works in the context of solo play. And that's all for cases where I'm working from an existing map; creating a good tactical map is a skill, and it's not one that I'm particularly sure I'm any good at.
Hexball would abstract away some of the variation in placement that exists in Guild Ball for the purpose of making it easier to parse while keeping the stuff that makes Guild Ball good. In the same way, my hope is that a Ladder system would keep some of the combat grid's benefits while cutting out what are to me downsides. I like that the grid system removes ambiguity and allows you to make rules elements that interact with it; I don't like the fact that it's (more or less) 1:1 representative of physical space. It's that representative correspondence that I want the Ladder to abstract out, replacing it with something that measures positional advantage.
Hopefully the above is cogent; I felt that [free move]:[grid]::[grid]:[ladder]::[representational]:[abstract] was a profound enough thesis to warrant that whole spiel.
