Doesn't really sound like you see on both sides of the issue. Sort of sounds like you see on Raz's side of the issue, and gave some lipservice to mine.
Don't worry, I've got your back.
The reason that I take my stance on Asterian canon is simple; as a GM, I found that the FMs of Nepleslia, and Yamatai, were particularly stifling. Many people wanted to use SAINT or the IPG, or they wanted to write some sort of 'trouble' happening in lands that, canonically, should not have those sort of troubles. For instance, Yamatai is a utopia, SAINT Is infallable, the Star Army of Yamatai very rarely loses, and it has the best technology in the setting, Nepleslia used to be a military dictatorship, and so on. Many was the time when I heard, 'it would be cool if the Yamatai houses fought' or 'let's do a police plot' or something. I recall there was a plot in Nepleslia a while ago that used a SUBMARINE of all things, as a base of operations. People wanted to write little revolutions, sometimes, against the established canon. They looked at it sideways and said, it's too perfect. And, so did I.
I won't pretend that this is the right decision or that it's a decision that works in normal Star Army. It's canon that Yamatai is the best, for instance, though I'm not aware of current canon with Nepleslia - as I said, I don't pay attention to those things.
But I have deliberately written Asteria imperfect. Its government is effective, but diverse, a little confusing sometimes, and decentralized in large part. Its military is primarily the Shield of Asteria, but the various systems all field their own militaries, with as much color and flavor as any other little faction on the website. They use stuff from S6, from Styrling, from the Pact, from Origin - from wherever they can get their hands on it. They use old UOC gear in some cases; in some cases, they're RPing producing or testing new gear, or discovering new tech, on planets that have, canonically in the instance of HX-14, been already scanned.
As an FM I can get away with, for instance, allowing a GM to say that HX-14 was scanned but all the people there disappeared for some reason important to their plot.
If someone wants to make Iroma a thing in a plot, I'm OKay with allowing the GM to reference some obscure ship crash somewhere. Or for some random first contact with a new species (that flies around in goddamn star-sailing ships,
@Gunsight1 , and they are fucking beautiful space tieflings), I can give a light shrug and say, if it's important to your plot, you can do it.
There are some things that I do put my foot down on, but they're mostly due to the differences in culture between the Asterian setting system and the system usually gainfully employed by other FMs. For instance, you have to flesh out the stuff you want to use; that's a requirement. It becomes incumbent upon those people to make it make sense. Sometimes, they will fail. Often, much more often I find, they succeed.
Even in Star Army plots, I notice a proliferation of 'oddball' characters, or characters that aren't standard, or characters that aren't following orders or acting like military personnel, and the list goes on and on. You might not like the D&D Exceptionalism, but it's the mode of operation that most players ascribe to. Everybody, ironically, wants the pure unique snowflake edgelord, or at least they do at a certain point in their lives, and they write those whether you rigidly enforce some setting rule or not. The GM then, usually, makes some sort of rule exception or talks to the player about the inconsistency - and that happens, usually, here, too. I just let the GMs handle it, in those cases, because I'm managing the faction's image.
What we have come up with, although it may seem a little ridiculous, is a place like you're describing - but it's lampshaded very well. Odd things happen in Asteria, but it's a Frontier, so odd things are normal. Garts and NMX wage little wars in Tange. Some mormon elf converted to a Lorath heresy in Kotaku. Asura is a group of states that is currently dealing with an insurgency led by a bunch of body-hopping ex-Blackcoats. There have been weird chicken-calvary charges. There's people swinging swords around. There's powered armor, ships, snipers, and somehow without any mention of the Damage Ratings, or any consideration of how silly or ridiculous it looks, people have sat down and created real, moving stories.
People have died in Asterian plots. People talk about law, about morality, about sexuality and jealousy - people talk about right, and wrong, and just cause, and violence.
In the end, the setting, to me, can be flexible, if it allows people to write moving and entertaining stories, or to play their characters well. Etheral, for instance, is playing through his werewolf fantasies (sorry, Eth, I can't get away from how similar to werewolves your species is), vying in a weird love triangle between a literal Ahura/Lorr demon, a Gartagen, a (former) Nepleslian, for the love or attention of a Half-Elven sniper in service to the Mikado.
If you step back and squint at it? It's ridiculous. It's stupid. It's boring.
But it's not written by poor writers. Quite the contrary. It's actually really, stunningly amazing what people have done with this. A Helashio and a Vekimen, lacking modern weapons, just dueled each other in the center of a battlefield with cobbled-together powered armors and melee weapons recovered from a crashed NMX ship. A Kodian, one of the fan favorites in Knights of Asteria, died defending that helashio and a bunch of his friends, shot to ribbons by a rifle company.
From the outside looking in, I can easily see how many of the things that we are writing look very ridiculous and completely idiotic. However, I would maintain that much of the setting is a secondary concern; it just provides the backdrop. The characters are unique, have life in them, are written by people who genuinely care about what they write about. It isn't ridiculous to them, and although I find that it's sometimes ridiculous to me, often I can talk the GMs or sometimes directly the players into doing something that either makes more sense, comes more into line with Asterian canon, or in many cases, I just let them write that canon themselves.
The Asterian Marshals, for instance, came from someone wanting to play space cowboys. The Magister's Consortium, our new chief science/production company, was from someone wanting to Do Science! and now both of those factions serve an active and important function in keeping the country running. People got to write that.
So when I say that I never say no, if I can help it, that is what I mean. I will work with you to bring what you wish to write in line with the current canon, or sometimes if your idea is better, I will adopt it. I will do everything that I felt was offered to me as a player by Wesley, and by all the trust that he put in me when I was GMing, and playing in his faction, and I will also take all the things that I hated happening sometimes, and I will move beyond those things. I want Asteria to do well, and I want the site to do well, and I have never seen good come of an FM sitting around and saying that people can't use his setting elements, or that they cannot represent them.
That is what I mean by keeping a flexible view of canon, within reason. I don't let it get in the way of giving my GMs their tools, or my players their entertainment, and so far I've had nothing but good reviews from them and the GMs who have signed on have enjoyed the freedom and the ability to write in such a setting, which benefits from the work of countless players and multiple supporting FMs from other factions, in similar ways to the way in which Soresu offered to allow Iroma, in the way that Gunsight contributed those... kiriku... bird things, and so on and so on.
To me, Asteria really feels like a Frontier setting where no one culture totally dominates, and where independant, Asterian, or other plots, can have a hayday without worrying about being stifled by FMs worrying about their setting being made to look a little ridiculous sometimes.
