If nothing else, it appears that this blog is serving to allow some discussion back and forth between the various folks involved and that's fine with me.
Comment threads are hard to follow, so I'm working on some alternatives, but for now, I'll pull out a few specific items and respond here to keep things moving along.
From Rodney:
"I guess my concern with your suggestions would be that a lot of the experience you talk about seems to be either difficult to obtain for someone who joined another corp for a "sabbatical", or doesn't seem to be any higher-value for being acquired elsewhere, other than the PvP experience aspect.
Wouldn't it also be difficult to find someone who was out there in the real game, away from the Uni, and was willing to give up a big chunk of their time to come back and serve as Eve Uni's Director of Personnel, or Logistics, or Education?"
My suggestion was simply that a Director has to have flown with someone else, not that they serve in a position of leadership. DirLog (for example) could bring a much broader perspective of the logistics opportunities available to players having served in a corp that is focused strictly on mining or production. Bringing that knowledge back into Uni would be a significant benefit.
I think you would be surprised how many Uni vets and/or Uni supporters would return.
As far as any hypothetical return, I don't think that's in the cards, so speculation about tactical decisions, rather than strategic issues, would only tend to be divisive and draw the focus away from more fundamental questions.
From Ethan:
"At any point today was the success of your POS-removal mission in jeopardy? I'm pretty sure it wasn't, we may have had more ships but you had vastly more tonnage. I'm just curious what you have to say about it."
In terms of the overall mission and fulfillment of our contract obligations, I don't think so. The lag was very pronounced, but those of us who lacked big POS warfare experience learned tons about the appropriate techniques to minimize the lag experienced, to fight through it and be effective. I was surprised at the number of battleships it took. My expectation, based on my time at Uni was that a large Empire faction Deathstar POS would require between 100-150 battleships to take down. Our fleet peaked at around 50 or so.
Uni FC faced a tough proposition being outgunned against a group that was clearly willing to absorb losses to achieve the objective.
From Andrew:
"I'm still struck by the apparent split between the "it's not personal" claims, and the arguments we see everyday."
Let me try it this way:
The decision to issue merc contracts against Uni was highly personal for the issuer.
My decision to participate was not personal and remains so. I'm not going to make any isk out of it and didn't expect to do so.
What I did expect was to learn more about how to fight on the outnumbered side of typical Uni engagements and to blow stuff up. I expected that, unlike some Uni opponents, Seppuku would bring the fight early and often and that no one would ever be able to accuse us of dec'ing and then fading into the woodwork.
My expectations have been met so far!
From Kelduum:
"However, there is a discussion topic open on the Directors forum at the moment as to how we can rectify this, but of course, getting everyone in battleships without the ability to fit them properly is never a good idea."
There has been a thread discussing that topic almost continuously for years. The root cause is the Catch-22 of needing experienced, skilled combat pilots, but not being able to 1) retain them or 2) recruit them. In any organization, if the big picture attitudes and policies are consistently not allowing objectives to be achieved, then something has to change significantly.
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