Hah, the scenario-designer must have been high when listing the difficulties... I mean, the 'SUPER HARD' Caelum starts with
3 provinces! Being Caelum, that won't even slow down the start of his initial expansion by a turn as it would any other nation (since the army can just fly over the provinces). So I rather think either the difficulties indicate how easy it is to fight against said nation instead of how hard the position is, or just generally lack in reasoning
(It is definitely not a big negative to only have 2 neighboring provinces, especially for Caelum who wants to build more forts quickly anyways and doesn't need resources all that much in the long run.)
I tried removing the #scenario-tag from the .map-file, and it restored the settings while retaining the special start locations; dunno if it has any other effects, though.
(I don't think CB's Pretenders- or Scales-portions use #clear either, so it should be a piece of cake to hack together a mac-friendly version of those, if there was a need.)