I honestly don't think the disconnect is as dramatic as you think it is. There's clearly an intended playstyle behind paladins and the flavour sets out to define that as clearly as possible. But the mechanics aren't so ironclad that they block any and all edge cases, which they probably would never do anyway. They set out what's expected and leave it to players to decide if they want to have fun by subverting that in some way. You're right about the difficulties arising from trying to put it into code, but that just means whoever's making the game has to make their own call, it's not inherently an automatic problem.
