This seems exactly what the OP is complaining about. Why would you want that, rather than just hitting 'r' or whatever?
(I literally have no idea how to reload a gun, FWIW. Having it be "realistic" doesn't actually make it easy or discoverable.)
If you shoot real guns a lot, it's probably second nature. But it's a fairly involved motor process that's cumbersome to implement in VR. Furthermore, different guns in FPS games can have different (often creative) reload animations; Reaper from Overwatch for instance, simply discards his twin short-barrel shotguns and pulls out two new ones. Will these different reload animations necessitate different VR gestures?
Going for realism in VR or any video game is fraught with these kinds of problems. "The more you get specific about situations analogous to reality, the more you have to stipulate on." --Egoraptor
(There's a YouTube channel of a guy who makes different "reload animations" of himself wielding various objects (smoke detectors, caulk guns, toasters, Furbies, etc.) as "guns" with a different, unique way of reloading each: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHi-xECyGTU )
Because it's more immersive.
> Having it be "realistic" doesn't actually make it easy or discoverable.
Isn't it the games job to teach you this? Like it's teaching you which button to use?
Realistic skydiving game: Start! Drive your civic to the DZ. Oh no there’s traffic! Wait for plane. Get in plane. Take 20 minutes to fly to altitude. Fall for 1 minute. There are no obstacles, nothing around you so you don’t die. Land. Wait to get picked up, take 1 hr to repack your parachute. Talk to your friends about how cool it was.
Fun skydiving game: Start! Jump out of airplane immediately. Skydive for 15 minutes. Surf on the wing of a plane. Avoid obstacles. Fly around buildings. Try to land in a swimming pool on the side of a mountain. Land. Parachute repacks automatically. You’re back in the air automatically.
As another case in point: movement speeds in most first-person 3D games are unrealistically fast (like, walking at 10 mph, running at 20+ mph), because realistic movement speeds would make navigating around the game world painfully slow.
I think it's more engaging/immersive not because it's more realistic, but rather because it adds nuance to the action and makes it more of a skill to be learned. The lows of the "oh shit" moment of flubbing a reload in the middle of a firefight and the highs of pulling off a perfectly timed John Wick-esque reload in the middle of a firefight are much more intense than just tapping a button.
It's a more embodied version of the "reload bar" mechanic in some games where you can just hit the reload button for a normal reload or hit it twice with good timing to get a better/faster reload, but if you miss the sweet spot you get a worse/slower reload.
The focus in VR games right now is creating realistic interactions. Ideally, your controllers should be only for interacting with meta content, like menus and other things "outside" of the game, or for controlling virtual hands.
Pushing a button to trigger a visible sequence of actions from your character breaks the immersion. It creates a separation between you and your character in a scenario where you're supposed to be the character.
Ultimately it is a stylistic choice. There's definitely room for both types of game in this space, but combining realistic and arcade style interactions in the same game tends to not work that well.
A big part of VR is manipulating psychology to fool you into feeling more immersed. It works pretty well until it doesn't, then users can become very uncomfortable.
I think the main problem here is semantics. We use the term VR to describe wholly-immersive games as well as traditional flat games with a 3D head mounted display, and everything in between. OP seems to just want a HMD experience tied to a traditional game. The industry really needs to come up with new terms to disambiguate these ideas.