My Life As A Gamer: Get Out Of The Robot, Shinji. This Is D&D.

"I don't want to wargame. I want to play a single character, I want to customize everything about my character, and I want to push my performance to the limit."

You're Mech Piloting.

In real world terms, what you're doing is designing a concept car--a racer, fighter, bomber, etc.--and putting through design testing, including actual combat conditions (or sport, or whatever), in order to refine the design to its final state before shifting your focus to mastering the skill necessary to get peak performance from your machine.

Guess what a very common subset of wargame involves? Research and development.

This does not mean that you escape from Braunstein. It means that you are going to find yourself subordinate to others who can and do see the medium for what it is and act accordingly, and you will find yourself time and again being the guy that makes the widgets and/or trains users to use widgets to best effect.

If you can get over yourself, you can see that you have a valuable position as a kingmaker. You're not the Federation or Zeon; you're Anaheim Electronics- and you supply mobile suits to all sides, meaning your enemies are your counterparts.

You're the Fighter that trains the world-conquering warriors. You're the Magic-User that creates the spells and items that make or break the designs of empires. You're the Cleric that can command the attention of entire kingdoms without ruling any of your own. You're the Thief whose intelligence network is so good that you know what others plan before anyone else, while no one knows that you exist.

You get the idea.

The reason that you can't escape the wargame frame is because otherwise you don't have a game for you to flex on. That's what your Mech Piloting is all about; you find a way to show off by way of using your mastery of the rules of the game to display how awesome you are before others and thereby (you hope) accrue status and cultivate positive sentiment towards you. It's a form of peacocking and attention whoring.

"But-"

Shut it, Anon. I've seen it time and again over my as-long-as-D&D-itself lifetime. I am more than certain of what I speak.

You're the guy that gets a thrill to see your character build become dominant in the overall scene, which is why your psych profile drifted out of tabletop RPGs and into CCGs, games like Space Mace 39K, and especially MMORPGs and similar online games with both a deep character build meta and a heavy competitive element such as MOBAs.

You're the guy that goes hard when Stupid Irvine Game Company has a beta test period for Globe of Gankcraft, participates in the World First races (because that's when you can see if your new build and skillset works), or makes the card deck that destroys all competition for an entire season of Crack The Mogging or Story of the Samurai D&D Setting tournaments.

The least you can do is be honest with yourself, admit that this is what drives you, and make yourself useful in a eu-social manner. Be the Walking Rules Encyclopedia and help others work the rules to get what they want out of it- assuming you're using a ruleset so damned dense, complex, and fiddly that such acumen is warranted.