[Edi]

Your idea of what should be done with patches and the developers' idea of what should be done with patches may differ significantly, Xietor.

The IW guys are not doing this out of some great monetary incentive, but because they wish to, so things are mostly going to get done their way or not at all. If their vision is a division to different ages, then you WILL be stuck with that division unless you can muster the effort to do something about it for yourself. If you want all nations in a single age, then make a mod to the effect of

#modname "Single Age"
#description "1 age, all nations"

#selectnation 1
#era 1
#end

Repeat for all nations and you're done. Using copy-paste for three rows is not beyond anybody's capabilities and making that particular mod takes less than 5 minutes. You do need to make sure to change names so that the various nations with the same names will differ somehow to get them all in, but that's not much more work.

Then you can pick whatever you want. You can even do three variants, one for each age, if you want some change in the types of indies.

You complain about work and limited free time, but did it ever occur to you that both Johan and Kristoffer have full time day jobs and they use THEIR SPARE TIME for making Dominions. Time they cold spend with their families, friends and significant others or just doing something else. Think very hard about that.