If you can't actually accomplish the plan you chose, your decisions and knowledge just might not be very good. I don't see the difference to skill issues in other games, including in turnbased strategy games. A strong player will optimise their economy better and have more troops, and on top of that control those troops better.
Imagine if in order to build settlers in Civilization you needed to type 85 words per minute. Does that mean you're a skilled strategist because you 'chose' to be a warmonger and never build a settler? Or does it mean you had no other options? Would it make the game better by raising the skill cap?
It's funny to see that analogy, because i always hated all forms of gambling, and even in poker i've always been skeptical how much "skill" actually factors in that game.
I felt the same way, but it's undeniable that some people can make a living doing it, even playing online when there's no 'tells' to exploit. The margins are slim to be sure, but if you know what cards are left in the deck and what that means your opponents might have and you might have, that's a skill for sure.
The main reason why it is much easier to get into the game is the simple fact that you play 5 vs 5.
You can play 4v4 in most RTS games as well. Same thing happens in both genres: If you're shit, someone on the other team (and probably your own team) will notice and pick on you. Like I said before, the difference is that in a moba you can learn from that pretty much every time, outside some shit that might go over your head, like ward placement. You won't learn anything from getting rushed down before you're ready in an RTS because it's just a straight up dexterity issue at that point. You may as well go practice some mouse accuracy drills instead of the game.
The biggest factor of luck is whether you get good teammates when playing public, but the game play and mechanics are nowhere near poker.
This is true, but the part about it being extremely knowledge based and requiring excellent memory and recall is the same. One of the biggest advantages you can get playing dota is knowing exactly how much damage another player can deal to you with their spells. It means what appears to be 50/50 odds to a newbie is revealed to be 80/20 odds to an expert. There's still some uncertainty; maybe they roll a critical hit, maybe their teammate happens to be hidden close by (another factor you can mitigate with good memory and attention) but if you at least know that you'll survive their entire suite of spells +3 attacks, or that your speed advantage means you can hit them twice as they run back to the tower, or that their spell has a 6 second cooldown and you can engage and escape before it comes back... that's where the game is won and lost in the early stages. Which, btw, are pretty much 1v1 or 2v2 duels anyways, and you can absolutely get beaten badly enough at that stage to lose the whole game for your team if everyone else is at a deadlock.
Moba's are popular because the game fundamentally rewards gameplay experience and knowledge more than pretty much any other type of game. Your ability to theory craft is incredibly important. It seems like it'd be important in an RTS, but it's really not because any situation where a given strategy should win can simply be changed to another with enough micro. Do banelings work well vs small, fragile units? Well they're supposed to, but the answer is actually that they work well vs players that can't split their units apart at a momet's notice. This also means that as you rise through the ranks, things you took the time to learn before become not just irrelevant, but outright wrong.
