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Consistency: the Fundamental Arguments
There's a spectrum of how consistent a roleplaying game can be. In a consistent game, everything in the game should make sense when compared with everything else. Here are some examples of what I mean:

- If it took Yoda nine hundred years to reach his level of power, it should take a player character Jedi who started out with the same stats as Yoda did the same length of time to achieve the same abilities.

- In a swords-and-sorcery game where wizardry is a well-established art, wizards should have a stable and accepted role in society. It would be common for kings and lords to either use magic themselves or to hire wizards to do their bidding. Lesser wizards might hire themselves at a cheaper price to a town council, to work for the good of the town (boosting harvests, healing the sick, etc). Others might set up private practice, performing feats of magic for paying customers. It would be normal practice to interrogate alleged criminals under the influence of a truth-inducing spell or potion.

- If the Emperor hires the best fighters in the land to be in his elite Eagle Regiment, and the soldiers of the Eagle Regiment are mostly 17th-21st level characters, then it is unreasonable to let the player characters to get even near this level just by wandering around, fighting monsters and looting tombs. They should only be able to get as good as Eagle Regiment troops by going through the same things: long years of hard training and experience of war.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, a game without consistency would involve no such considerations. In the inconsistent game, things simply are how they are to make an enjoyable story for the scenario. If there's an abandonned castle in the desert full of monsters with hoards of treasure, or if magic has a certain obvious use but for some reason it's never used like that, you don't ask why; you just accept that that's the way of it.

THE BENEFITS OF CONSISTENCY

Many gamers, like me, are annoyed by games that don't make internal sense. I say 'Why's that like that?' and 'If I can do that, why can't I do this?' or most of all, 'This is the obvious thing to do - why doesn't anyone do it?'

This is more than simple childish annoyance. Roleplaying for many people is about immersion in the story and the gameworld - feeling like you are parts of a living reality and not just playing chess with abstract gamepieces for characters. This makes roleplaying one of the greatest developments of the story game. When a story plainly doesn't make sense, this can destroy the illusuion of the story and gameworld, ruining the game.

THE DRAWBACKS OF CONSISTENCY

Insisting on consistency can mean that you decide not to do fun things which you would like to have in your game because they go against what would be possible in the gameworld.

Consistency can lead to routine dullness. But to be honest this is prevalent in games which make no sense as well.

Writing a consistent game is a hell of a lot more work than not bothering with it.

Consistency can lead people to take the game far too seriously and forget that it's supposed to be fun.