In my opinion, it’s less about Burgundy being unrealistic than Burgundy being unfun mechanics-wise and just simply bad storytelling. It’s so blatantly shoved into the game as they überpowered North Korea clone that could somehow manipulate global politics the world over as the true puppet master behind everything while also being so intrinsically evil that it literally just wants to nuke everything. To some that may be a compelling story, but to me it just feels totally at odds with the rest of the story that TNOTL weaves. I’ve seen some argue that it fits in the narrative as the real dark heart of Nazism, but frankly I think the Reich more than speaks for itself and it hobbles the entire point just to throw in these mustache-twirling space marines who live in a shadowy state and play everyone like a fiddle. It’s absurd. You could do so many more narratively-interesting things with the SS if you freed them from the shackles of being attached to the tired old Burgundy lore. I would welcome its utter annihilation.
On the broader point of “realism”, I’d say that realism for realism’s sake without having a clear idea of what to do next can harm a mod. But all the complaints about Kaiserreich this and realism that kinda feel flat to me because the lore they’re replacing tends to be incredibly two dimensional even if it pops more on the surface. KRTL’s China rework took away the silly but flashy Qing lore and managed to redo the entire thing so that China is now one of the deepest and most fleshed out areas while actually being more fun to play than it originally was. Atlantropa might’ve looked cool on the surface, but it caused so many problems in the game’s lore that pretty much just had to be ignored in game outright because it was so egregious. If your concept is so thoroughly unimplemented that the ramifications have to be sidelined and only addressed in a few offhanded ways, it isn’t a good concept and needs to be addressed some other way. Same goes for most of these reworks in my opinion. They take lazy and half baked ideas which by sheer staying power have become iconic and redo them to be much more coherent, and more importantly, much more fun and narratively interesting. I mean my god, just look at those political charts that the Kaiserreich teams have produced for British and French politics and tell me that isn’t a million times more compelling than the tripartite Totalist/Syndicalist/Anarchist scheme copy pasted almost identically to every single leftist country with a little minor flavoring sprinkled on top. These reworks require shit to get changed which seems to upset people, but the stuff getting changed is for the most part pretty damned unfun and very poorly thought out in comparison to the standards of modding and writing that many of the major teams have access to today. But I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t understand the attachment people have to certain parts of mod lore.
