I voted arcade but the thing is, i can have just as much fun with either game type. The thing that annoys me is when games set down their rules and then proceed to break them. If the game is trying to be perceived as realistic,then it should not have blatantly unrealistic mechanics. Falling 20 ft and not breaking my leg is a completely ridiculous concept to me. Granted, the mechanics that are present also have to contribute to making the game more fun. Being able to fart para-shoots is also very unrealistic, but it's less so than being able to take that fall and walk away. That doesn't mean that there isn't a still better solution though. With enough creativity, you could make the game both fun and reasonably realistic. Perhaps the soldiers could have grappling hooks and ropes that they throw behind them to catch the edge of the building as they jump off and repel down?
Realistic games have very well known rules, as they are meant to mimic what would happen in real life, it's glaringly obvious when they fail to do this. If i understand your meaning when you say arcade games, these are games that don't care weather or not they're realistic, Mario, Pac-Man, (basically anything that's not meant to be realistic)but they still set down rules. If i see that same 20 ft fall in a Star Wars game (EG. SWBF) then i really could care less, stranger things have happened in that universe and there are a multitude of obvious explanations. But when a rocket trooper shoots you at point blank range with his rocket launcher, or drops mines or det packs on your face, I scream bullshit if TK's are off. These are completely ridiculous tactics and should not be possible (btw these guys are walking away from these massive explosions while i die). The game says that explosions hurt, we all know this, these are weapons meant to take out tanks and they're being fired into the ground right at the shooters feet and he simply walks away. Yes, a large part of my complaint is that these tactics are being exploited and generally considered extremely cheap and impossible to defend against (if they manage to get that close to you). But the lack of realism in this case is a fairly big flaw in the game(and in this case, the realism of the game is relative to the universe that it takes place in).
