Dammit, stop making such good counterarguments.
They're really not even that good.
He keeps bringing up 10/10 as a measure of balance, when 10/10 is literally supposed to be impossible to beat.
If I can beat that difficulty with any strategy it would be a miracle, because you're not supposed to be able to beat it.
He's using extreme examples to try to prove his point.
If the game only becomes a strategic, non-build-order spam on 9+ difficulties, then the design still sucks, plain and simple.
You keep assuming that the game has no strategy, despite evidence otherwise. Just because strategy is in choices in planets and techs instead of tactical choices doesn't make it any less strategy. I'm REALLY curious what version of AI wars didn't encouraging blobbing, since it certainly wasn't before 3.5ish era when I joined up.
People think the design of the game has improved since 2.0, but in actuality most of what has improved is the interface, the controls, and graphics, etc.
I mean for God's sake, the horrible galaxy pathfinding has been around since the game was released 3 years ago, and thousands of patches later, it still hasn't even been addressed. If the damn pathfinding was a minor issue for all these years, consider what had to have been worse than that to come first.
It was a one-man project that tried to cover a huge scope and scale, and in many ways it succeeded, but at the cost of a very unpolished and ugly game, with several bugs and issues. Part of the problem is that we continue adding bonus ships, continue adding scenarios, AI Plots, minor factions, AI personalities, etc., and still ignore the major underlying issues with the game.