I guess we will go through it again, drano. I'm interested in your concept of gathering competitive Dip players together for games. However, I'm not willing to call a game of standard regular Diplomacy a "special rules game". Diplomacy allows game long alliances. It's not a matter of VDip allowing them or not. There's nothing illegal, unethical, or wrong about a game long alliance. The problem that you and I appear to have hear (because I think we both agree on your concept) is that you're beating around the bush in your definitions. What you're talking about is honesty and integrity, and you don't want to call it that because you're too nice to come out and say that people cheat at VDip, and the moderators tolerate it, leading the community to accept it as encouraged and acceptable behavior.
There's no passive-aggression going on from me. I say what I mean. I think that's pretty clear. Maybe it comes across that way to you because I'm contesting your approach of labeling the game 'special rules' while at the same time I have nothing but respect for you. You're not part of the problem as a player. But as a leader, you're sugar coating the entire reason for why these games have an appeal.
The reality is that this failure to properly define the guidelines/rules for the game is going to lead to misinterpretations. It already has as we have both seen. Bringing it up here is not an attempt to dive into the details of the past, but to avoid it repeating itself.
So, I will repeat myself. I want to play, but only if we can be open and honest about the fact that there's nothing necessarily special about the rules we're playing under, absent a variant that requires them. Now if you want to go on the say that the 'group hug draws' will be frowned upon, or that prearranged alliances, and cross gaming will not be tolerated, that's great, but that's not really a 'special' rule. I hate to be so openly argumentative about this, but it's my opinion that you're doing more damage to the problem here by classifying standard play as special, thus driving the average player deeper into the coddled world of mediocrity where dubious ethical behavior is commonplace and accepted.
Rinascimento is not a flawed map because it's imbalanced. It's intentionally imbalanced. I think that you have to chalk that game up to a "for fun" experience, and accept that if you draw a weak power, that it's just a challenge to take it as far as you can. The odds are long, and that's part of the fun of it. The reason that this variant is not more popular is because the site tracks statistics, and awards points and rankings to performance. So anyone competing in those arenas is going to be pretty reluctant to take on a rather certain defeat.