trupheus people that were called retarded in that thread earned it when they stopped using reasoned logic and resorted to trolling "this is bad because of mysterious reasons" over and over, or intentionally spreading misinformation to scare people into voting a certain way. In retrospect, I should have just started giving 3-day bans for people that couldn't contribute something of substance to that conversation - then it could have continued on to be much more civilized and productive. Oh well, live and learn.
I've seen the conversions around the starting resources/castles woes, haven't seen anything that really piqued my interested yet. The thing with starting everyone off with 10 castles is it will really piss off a lot of traditionalist that enjoy starting from scratch. I don't think that's the right solution to the issue, but I like where the brainstorming is headed, and I like aspects of the current "castle chance" thing - though we will likely turn that down to only affecting the first 5 castles.
Good luck with the power outage, one of my friends in S.C. has been out for over 24h now and she's going crazy :/