Micah:
Try to imagine how would it look with really balanced nations. Doncorazon had not much time to play his nation, so he did not use his great nation and spot. Ermor has awesome spot on that map [see Warcry] and some nations had really extremely bad position [bad nation + weak spot] - Marverni, Ulm, C'tis and Agartha. You can try to come out of that position, but you are doomed from the start. Playing to achieve the most out of bad can be fun, but every player should have pretty much equal chance for winning. And Kailasa was probably one of the nominees for victory from the beginning on that map
I am not sure if what we have in LAND [big nations just eating small ones unable to organise anything to even put up a fight] is cool. Artifacts should be erased from our memores as an example of a game that should not exist. And now normal games without gem gens are much more appealing.
You also probably did not read my line about GreeceStain properly - I was complaining about Dawn map, Greece is probably the most balanced map around, but I don't think you can find 18 nations on similar level, unless making it multi-era RAND or giving vets weaker nations on purpose.