@XC3LL Thanks for posting this, great to see someone has the guts to say the emperor is naked!
My 2c:
- Red Teams should be about the "difficult" things you mention at the end IMO. Spending resources on initial access is mostly pointless (from the client's perspective, finding 0d is always cool ofc) when a new blinky box exploit, leaked code signing cert, etc. is popping up every other week. IME many clients pay for (bad) initial access simulations because organizing assumed breach in-house is hard.
- A way to burst the bubbles you describe is to mandate scenarios based on real-world threat intel. But this works against intial access again, because RT's can't scale their R&D as black hats do (attack surface is clients vs the Internet).