[quote=mdk]
The victory conditions were stacked in our favor. All we had to do was fight Britain to a stalemate unfavorable enough that they'd give up. The prospect of maintaining an American colony had to be so prohibitively expensive that any future attempts at control would be untenable. Which, turns out, was easy to accomplish -- simply by being in a state of open rebellion, Washington's mere existence was proof that we could not be ruled. It didn't matter that his army always lost -- , and he would always have an army -- would always be able to find international support from enemies of Britain, would always find colonists willing to replenish his ranks, would always and forever occupy *some* british territory *somewhere*, and nothing about that is a wise investment for an evil Redcoat overlord. TLDR -- of course America won. We had the smallest, poorest, worst-trained and badly led troops, but we also had the simplest victory conditions. That's the same thing currently giving us trouble in the middle east, too. It doesn't matter that you can kill a thousand terrorists with the click of a mouse -- that doesn't fuck with their odds of winning *at all*.
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Aaannnnddd this (amongst other reasons) is exactly why I said this:

[quote=Halo]Although thinking about it, I prefer the question "were the rebels actually the underdogs?" more than "could the British have beaten them?" That'd be much more fun to argue. >:3
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But it's still undeniable that the British could have won at multiple points despite those victory conditions being stacked against them. You say "of course America won" - well, uh, actually, no, it was never that clear-cut. America would always have gained independence eventually, one day, for the reasons you said or as part of the collapse of the British empire, but there was absolutely no guarantee that Washington would win independence with his rebellion (indeed, he very nearly lost multiple times and only got away with it via luck and foreign aid.)