I would not be surprised if the phobia of 1st is related to the phobia of Mary Sues, you're right. (And I think even now I'd be really hesitant to do a long fanfic in the 1st person of an OC, even if you can get really excellent outsider POV effects that way.)
I'm not sure that omniscient is *inherently* harder to do well than 3rd limited - like I've said, I actually find 3rd limited *really hard* - but because there's so little work, comparatively, being currently written in good omniscient, omniscient is, mm, harder to learn? Most people just pick up the rules of 3rd limited by osmosis these days, but it's a lot harder do to that with omniscient unless you're reading only certain kinds of novels, and that leads to its own stylistic problems. And omniscient certainly isn't *easy*. And because people see 3rd limited as the invisible default, bad omniscient becomes a lot more noticeable than bad limited (also, if it's bad because it's an uncontrolled mix of the two, people tend to blame it on the omniscient rather than the limited.)
I am not surprised, given your love for metafiction and other really weird stuff, that you like 3rd person limited! I agree that it's definitely the best if what you're doing is playing with the toolkit (although again that might be partly because 3rd limited has the all conventions because it *is* conventional.) And a lot of other people are saying it's good for exactly the opposite reasons - I'm going to have to think about this some and maybe read back over some of the metafiction you've posted, because I think part of my issue with 3rd limited is the pressure to make it invisible, and that kind of writing really isn't interested in making it invisible.
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I'm not sure that omniscient is *inherently* harder to do well than 3rd limited - like I've said, I actually find 3rd limited *really hard* - but because there's so little work, comparatively, being currently written in good omniscient, omniscient is, mm, harder to learn? Most people just pick up the rules of 3rd limited by osmosis these days, but it's a lot harder do to that with omniscient unless you're reading only certain kinds of novels, and that leads to its own stylistic problems. And omniscient certainly isn't *easy*. And because people see 3rd limited as the invisible default, bad omniscient becomes a lot more noticeable than bad limited (also, if it's bad because it's an uncontrolled mix of the two, people tend to blame it on the omniscient rather than the limited.)
I am not surprised, given your love for metafiction and other really weird stuff, that you like 3rd person limited! I agree that it's definitely the best if what you're doing is playing with the toolkit (although again that might be partly because 3rd limited has the all conventions because it *is* conventional.) And a lot of other people are saying it's good for exactly the opposite reasons - I'm going to have to think about this some and maybe read back over some of the metafiction you've posted, because I think part of my issue with 3rd limited is the pressure to make it invisible, and that kind of writing really isn't interested in making it invisible.