Newbie suffering from unrest

[ano]

Just wondering why so many people like extreme strategies that look tasty on paper but that's all. Taking drain is nearly always a pain and you'll need a tremendous amount of micro to make something like this effective. Where are you going to spend those points? Killer pretender? Is it really worth it?
Sloth, OTOH, is almost never significant enough to take low Dominion score and recruit heretics for the gold that could be spent elsewhere (I mainly mean sceptics here).
What is much more important in a real MP game is candles. 9-10 is very good, 8 is ok, 7 is bearable, 6 is tough and everything less means that once you have a neighbor with an awake SC pretender or just many candles you will always have his dominion at your territory and thus all your good scales will be ignored. And you will have absolutely no chance to do anything with it even if you spend tons of gold on temples. It is real life.
Do you really need it? Also, I'm interested if anybody ever won a serious MP game with a dominion level lower than 6. Even if so I'm pretty sure it was hard.