I know I have covered this before but it is worth re-iterating.
I used to play a 'board' game called Starfire 3rd edition. It was a great game for role-playing and story telling, with a wealth of background material. The mechanics were interesting and fun but not particularly well-balanced in some cases. There were some huge technological leaps for example which gave the side that produced them a great advantage until the other side caught up. The longest AAR I have ever written (almost 1000 pages in Word) was from this game. The editor of Third Edition was David Weber (Honor Harrington, Safehold series, etc.) which explains the focus of story-telling.
Someone else bought the game and created 4th edition. With the best of intentions, that person decided to revise the mechanics to make them more 'competitive'. Rather than the single-player role-play campaigns that tended to dominate, he envisioned two or more people playing competitive games of Starfire, finding the most efficient way to win. He also removed the background material and role-playing aspects from the game as he saw them as unnecessary.
This caused a long and ugly row between the 'role-players' and 'competitive games' within the Starfire community that eventually led to a schism and a lot of bad feelings on both sides. It is also the reason I created Aurora. I am generalising here but the reason the former played the game was that Starfire was ideal for role-playing long campaigns, with each race having a 'personality'. To this group, who were happy to play a campaign for months or even years, who won was irrelevant compared to the fun of the journey, plus the fascinating situations and challenges that arose along the way. Balance wasn't a huge priority because having to deal with the short end of an unbalanced situation was also interesting.
For the competitive games, this seemed a very odd concept. They wanted to test themselves against other human opponents and prove their ships and strategies were the best. Balance was key, so that it was skill of the players that made the difference. They couldn't understand why anyone would choose to create a ship design that they
knew wasn't efficient. The explanation that the race designing the ship was operating from a different set of 'knowledge' than the player or that the most efficient design didn't suit the 'personality' of that race was often met with incomprehension.
Both points of view are valid. My current job (Director of Analytics for a multi-billion dollar online gambling company) and my previous one (professional poker player for six years) are very much 'competitive gamer' territory. I lead a large department that has to figure out the best way to spend many hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing, promotion, game design, etc.. We have to be very efficient and very competitive and argue our case effectively with C-level execs.
However, in my own time I am definitely a role-player. I want to create detailed and interesting campaigns where the actions of the 'player' races are based on their own knowledge and personality. For multi-player starts, I try to create widely different design philosophies for the starting races, even if some of those are not great choices from a 'player knowledge' perspective. Those races may even take potentially detrimental actions that are driven by the personality of the race or individual commanders rather than my omnipotent overview, because I am trying to play from their perspective, not mine. If you are not a role-player I completely understand you might think this is a ridiculous way to play a game
So, in summary, I am not judging whether role-playing or competitive gaming is the better option. I am simply saying that Aurora was intentionally created to suit the role-players without any real consideration for the competitive gamers. If you judge it based on competitive gamer principles, you could find it very frustrating. Also, the role-player vs competitive gamer argument effectively wrecked the Starfire community at the time, so I really don't want that to happen with the Aurora community.
Finally, if someone wants to persuade me to change something, because of the above you are going to have a lot more chance of success if you base your argument on how it will enhance a role-play campaign, rather than how it affects a competitive match.