Victory is Mine!

DBDC superiority is viable because the +/- 250 rule makes it possible for superior nation builders to engage nations that they wouldn't be able if they were dealing with the 75-133 rule. Their formula for success via nation advantage isn't viable in other tiers because you can't out build in those tiers. If you do, you're in another tier. Fark or any other alliance can have all the mil wonders they want in a given tier, but there's too many others in that tier for it to work out the way DBDC has. No one group in other tiers is as tight as DBDC (they're maybe the tightest group today) and has as the numbers needed to dominate. Old-fashioned coalition building will still be the way to victory in the other tiers.

DBDC is the future of their tier for sure and 15 rulers as well-coordinated as DBDC could do an impressive amount of damage in other tiers as well, but not enough for entire coalitions to PM that tier. That group would have to be at least several hundred with members spread across the right AAs before they could think about being an other tier DBDC.

This is a good freshman attempt, but a poor piece overall. It's premises are false and its complaints are based in political biases.

Up until [Equilibrium] the majority of wars had a meaning. Wars now are just dog-piles without any meaning apart from you might be a threat in the future so we're going to crush you now.

The NPO-ODN feud/wars from Digiterra's first days; the colonization of Blue and NpO-NADC wars; the GATO-NPO wars; the contrived war against GPA; the UnJust War and others were fought over "you might be a threat in the future." They can be seen as having more meaning than more recent wars because more effort was put into the OWF/RP/politicking game, but they were at their core simply wars over eliminating threats before they became unmanageable.

Throw those away, and you're still wrong. The PB-Polar War and the DH-NPO war were nothing but pre-emptive strikes, and DH explicitly stated that was the reason--2 years ago, which is eons.

You and your alliances supported both.

Up until equilibrium alliances fighting side by side usually had similar nation structure, a few big guys, a few really big guys and then standard alliance bottom tiers and mid tiers.

Alliances still operate this way, EQ is not a before/after point and DBDC is not new or novel. Graemlins, TOP, Umbrella, BN, and maybe a few others all predate DBDC by decades. Among this type of tier-exclusive model, DBDC is only novel in its lack of traditional structure, but there again AAs have experimented with structure for as long as there have been AAs. Illuminati, Vox, CoJ, GOONS1, NONE, Blackstone, NPO-NpO, etc. have all had novel structures, membership arrangements, etc.

The only thing that changed with (taking your benchmark) Equilibrium was the political landscape that NG found itself hamstringed upon, what you refer to as "This type of behaviour angered our super upper tier who didn't hate certain alliances of note we were being linked towards hitting because they remember them as good raiding partners, this changed NG's point of view"

Your government and membership hop-skipped along with the flow while C&G, DH, and PB attacked allies-of-allies and chained in AAs, and activated defensive treaties in mutual aggression, and it was you and your allies who giggled "coalition warfare, duuuuhhhhhh lol" while attacking AAs in the opposing coalition willy-nilly without declarations of war.

Everything you cite as having changed at EQ was being done years before EQ, everything you cite as causing disillusionment within NG was being done by NG and its allies.

The disillusionment came at EQ not because the practices were new with EQ, but because for the first time NG's ill-advised, immature friends-based foreign policy put NG in a position every AA with such a FP faces: War is political no matter how much "friendship" you've pumped into your foreign policy. And like the immature sort of people who follow such a policy, your super-duper nations and other disillusioned members did what immature people do: You just left. "Nations left because they did not want to smash into friends to suit someone else's ego trip of running a coalition."

And what have they learned? Nothing. Because DBDC continues to make its decisions and decide its political position based on the half-baked idea of "friends." It works right now because its friends happen to be politically lumped in generally one place, but within a few months, its friends will be dispersed again because politics is ever-changing, and those disillusioned and naive nations will once again face the same crisis.

The rhetorical questions you pose in the second half of your essay are based on your false premises and they're interesting for thought, but that's about it (for me, anyway). They have more to do with mechanics and that is not my territory, but those whose it is have responded adequately to the problems inherent in large numbers of alliances adopting a single-tier-based membership strategy.