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Considering that the online communities are usually largely competitive tournament-style players, that power-level would be shunned and mocked is not surprising since its not geared toward competitive tournament-style players.

In the end its a thing now. It'll be a thing for as long as there is an 8th edition. There will be a large chunk of people that will only use granular points and thats fine. There will be those that will use power levels and thats fine. I'll use both depending on what environment I am in.

I find neither superior to the other.

To the OP:

Narrative Play as a playstyle is for players more interested in a non-competitive type of game, where the story is paramount to their experience. Whether in creating a scenario before hand, writing up what happened based on the outcome of the game, or even in just having some cool stories to share later about something crazy that happened on the tabletop. Narrative Play at its core is more akin to an RPG like D&D or Pathfinder, where the players come together to come up with cool stories and a fun social experience as their primary gaming goals.

Matched Play as a playstyle is for players who want to play fair and even games, using armies balanced based on the current published Points values, the published imposed restrictions on army construction or specific actions, and using the particular scenarios from the book designed with Matched Play in mind. Matched Play is intended to provide equalized and fair games for armies constructed with greater granularity in Points values and using precision to make armies. This is good for games against opponents whom you may not be familiar with or comfortable playing.

Points and Power Levels (which are not the topic of this thread) can be used for either type of game.
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 Peregrine wrote:

 Nithaniel wrote:
If you start with the concept that narrative play lacks internal balance then the onus is on you and your opponent/partner to create through narrative the concept of deliberate balancing or deliberate imbalance.

You can do this with terrain, house rules, mission rules, varying victory conditions. Its your sandbox

Why would you want to start from a point of poor balance? All of those interesting story things work even better when you build on a balanced foundation, the only thing gained by reducing balance is the smug superiority certain players have when telling everyone how "casual" their games are.

No, it is not out of a sense of "smug superiority", but out of a desire to try something different than the standard games of 40K. I don't know what the players are like in your area, but the "casual" players in my area aren't "smug" about not playing in the tournaments. Rather, the "casual" players are tired and worn down from playing against the ultra-competitive players who treat every game as practice for a national-level tournament, and they themselves have a "smugness" about themselves and go so far as to criticize any "casual" player's army when it is not "optimized".

 Peregrine wrote:

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
Narrative stuff.

All of this can be done better by a more accurate point system and better balance, and nothing is gained by using the less-accurate point system instead.

And it can all be handled just fine by Power Levels. Not everyone wants the same thing out of the game as you, and some of us do not have the time or desire to try making lists for armies based on Points values that will be adjusted on a regular basis to balance the meta. A PL50 army now will be a PL50 army later, but a 2000 Point army might be a 1750 Point army later, or even a 2200 Point army after the update. Neither version is going to produce perfect balance, so why get all aggravated at players who aren't worried about granularity? We don't want list building to be similar to bookkeeping.