REWORK for the Academy. Is it needed or not?

Vic, the example with the cons isn't that unbalanced, in my opinion. Of course, there are completely terrible setups, but this can be fixed by restarting the game or doing some minimal scouting for 1-2 days. If you're playing maps generated by RMG, you shouldn't rely on or complain about such factors in the first place, because you made the choice to play that way.

Actually, I've always been "against" randomness and "in favor" of fixes precisely because of the factors you described! :D

That's why the concept of "overall game concept" is needed; it allows you to create some kind of argumentative basis or philosophy for certain changes. So that the arguments don't turn into "I like/don't like it," but have some objective component.

For example, I see that in your head, the thoughts "sometimes you get a start with 10 gnolls, it's fate" and "I hate the lack of control in the late game" coexist without contradicting each other. But that doesn't mean that they will coexist in the head of another player, because the dissonance is obvious.

In the case of "sometimes you get a start with 10 gnolls, it's fate" + "sometimes there's a lack of control in the late game, it's fate," the dissonance, if it exists, is masked by the overall concept of "SoD is one and indivisible, the immutability of the version is more important than its quality."