HQ is a toolbox, just use the parts you want to

Two answers to this one.

1) Thank goodness it is, I can stop worrying about the rules that make HeroQuest so unreliable as a Narrativist game. It just so happens a lot of these rules are the Glorantha specific ones that some may not even recognise as part of the rules. 

2) This is again a bit of a traditional gamer perspective, places like the Forge were created to do away with this kind of vague unreliable treatment of game rules. With this kind of approach you can drift any game into the type of game you always play, which results in a group having a house style and being convinced that systems are interchangeable. Nothing wrong with this, but HQ was very clearly a different and powerful game, I have no interest in turning it back into RuneQuest with a bit of narrational colour. And, I firmly believe the tenant that system does matter.