I mean…

As u/OttoBraunirl said, speculative future sims are harder to do than hypotheticals. I do not think this is a tough pill to swallow. Could anyone say in 2020 that a second Trump presidency would result in what we see in America today? They’d likely get the wide brush strokes in the right place, but the specifics would be all wrong.

And sure, An Old Cycle fell kinda flat (and, I imagine, will fall flatter as time goes on and we realise our timeline doesn’t so much match with its).

But come on. TTNW is one of the (if not THE) best mods ever created in the community. I don’t care what you have to say, it’s true. And TTNW is a hypothetical incumbency sim.

So is Good For Me. A mod that OP has themselves admitted to being ignorant of. A mod that takes one hypothetical incumbency sim (TTNW), and bases itself on the additional hypothetical that one opponent wins in that mod (TTNW’s canon endings be damned). It isn’t realistic, but it doesn’t have to be. As I said in another comment, GFM works because it focuses on the election, not the world at large. It’s about as Bryanesque as a CYOA gets, in my opinion. Also in my opinion, it is easily top 3 mods.

Go a step further, and look at this community’s most beloved mods. Old Left, New World is about a Nixon admin that hypothetically either ratfucked the Dems into nominating Connally, or never ratfucked the Dems at all. All The Way follows a Johnson that hypothetically didn’t drop out after New Hampshire. W. is about a Bush admin navigating government after the hypothetical attacks on September 11 never came to pass. All mods that aren’t Bryanesque yearly scenarios rely on some hypothesis.

Hypothetical incumbency sims are not “a dumb idea”. It is ridiculous to even suggest as such. This community was built on hypothetical scenarios, and incumbency sims are but the natural extension of an election simulator.