Touche. In my defense I'll note that it's easier to check a forum on the run than it is to install Dominions and my latest saved game. But yes, time spent posting could probably be used more productively on my thesis.
[He said, while writing a long post.]
It occurs to me that there are a lot of nice things you could do with allied nations. If you've ever played Axis and Allies, you know that the best way to lose as the Allies is neglect coordination and play nations as separate-but-equal (e.g. Britain trying to guard her African income from the Germans, when the Americans can actually do it more cheaply. Britain should be trying to help Russia by dropping troops in Karelia or bombing Berlin).
For instance, what if you combined Mictlan with Marverni? Mictlan can take terrible, suicidal scales (since they don't need Prod anyway and gold is fungible) and a massive bless and do the early expansion (ideally with an awake pretender), while Marverni takes good scales including magic and an imprisoned pretender. Together they can get a Blood Stone factory up relatively easily; Marverni can spread its nice dominion (with its cheap temples) over Mictlan's lands to at least cancel out the terrible scales, and funnel extra money from its good scales into Mictlan's early expansion. Marverni takes weakly-defended provinces with Marverni's dominion from Mictlan so they can both benefit from Marverni's better scales (since they're pooling gold anyway and positive scales only benefit the scale owner), while Mictlan holds on to any areas that are militarily contested. Mictlan's dominion needs to be strong enough to not get dominion-killed, but since Marverni and Mictlan have blood-sacrifice it should be possible to control exactly where Marverni's dominion lives.
In order to make it genuinely Axis and Allies-ish, however, you'd need an "Allied" option which lets you have troops in an allies' territory and participate in defense. Ideally as part of one large army with the PD but if necessary in a separate battle. And you'd want allies to be able to move through your territory at full mapmove. I don't see it happening with Dominions, but there's still a lot you could do with alliances in the game as it is.
-Max