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"This, and much more, she accepted - for after all living did mean accepting
the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case - mere
possibilities of improvement. She thought of the endless waves of pain
that for some reason or other she and her husband had to endure; of the
invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the
incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of
this tenderness, which is either crushed, or wasted, or transformed into
madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners;
of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer and helplessly have to
watch the shadow of his simian stoop leave mangled flowers in its wake, as
the monstrous darkness approaches."
― Vladimir Nabokov, Signs and Symbols

> I value storycraft.

The form of this story has used widely since, and those stories have been incredibly popular with both authors and audiences for well over 100 years now. Implying that a tried-and-true technique of story-telling lies outside of storycraft betrays basic a lack of understanding of the subject.

Story tellers enjoy this form for the challenge of balancing what the omniscient narrator reveals-- too much or too strong in one direction and the whole thing falls flat. Readers enjoy the form because it feels a bit like ski jumping-- the writer provides the momentum and the reader's imagination leaps off the end with all the story's implications flying past.

In fact, Nabokov balanced this same form masterfully in the short story, "Signs and Symbols." The effect there is that the reader leaps off into a level of... well, I don't want to ruin it. :) But it's enough to say that outside of VR I don't think that story could have been effectively written without using the lady-or-the-tiger form.