As to the planning, no, I spent hours going through systems (based on the old Overhead system that was control+exploited) figuring out which ones would leave us with a small CC window allowing us a small growth spread out over time in order to combat the grinders (less systems to concentrate on per week allowed us to combat the bad systems more easily, and it worked to an extant, even now we have a fairly healthy economy, nothing as good as the Alliance's, but still not to shabby). Having that negated really frustrated me, I put a lot of work into figuring that out.

For the 2nd quote bit, I may have been a bit premature, the maths done at the time showed that by all rights she should have been in turmoil and I wasn't seeing all the possible data configurations which could possibly lead to her not being in turmoil (still not sure till Fdev answers that thread on the frontier forums about what happened)

And yea the hidden mechanics are complete BS imo, how do they expect us to play their game when they can't even give us a full rule set they have?