What civilization or nation deserves to have its own TL?

[Jürgen]

It was too late, and most of them were dud programmes which would not repair anything, like those presented during the sejm of 1744, when most of nobility theoretically supported auction of army, the problem is they believed that projects which were intentionally designed to fail are good solutions to the problem, and even backed off from this when Prussians began spreading pamphlets saying "hurr durr this is absolutism, absolutism bad, Frederick II is an ally of Poland and protector of freedom". PLC didn't make any sense since the beginning and was very lucky state.

The biggest disaster for Poland was the mix of a giant nobility and lack of hereditary succession. If the nobility had been smaller the king would have been a in better position to convince or browbeat them into his idea or elect his son heir. If the crown had been hereditary the royal family could have slowly accumulated land and use that to fund a civil service and army. Instead they got giant nobility which kept increasing their own independence versus the kingdom, destroying any alternative power base by removing rights from everyone else and every time they got a royal family able to strengthen the central government they replaced them with a new royal family.

 

[Zygmunt Stary]

The biggest disaster for Poland was the mix of a giant nobility and lack of hereditary succession. If the nobility had been smaller the king would have been a in better position to convince or browbeat them into his idea or elect his son heir. If the crown had been hereditary the royal family could have slowly accumulated land and use that to fund a civil service and army. Instead they got giant nobility which kept increasing their own independence versus the kingdom, destroying any alternative power base by removing rights from everyone else and every time they got a royal family able to strengthen the central government they replaced them with a new royal family.

Yeah, I more or less agree with you, tho both problems are fault of factor "C" in "Commonwealth" since what made Poland "Commonwealth" was rejection of idea of hereditary succesion and the belief that all nobility needs to be equal to each other, even in theory. The last belief, by the way increased amounts of nobility, because it rejected idea of dividing nobility into "higher nobility" and "lesser nobility" (as it was done in for example, nearby and very close culturally Bohemia) + it generated problem of piss poor nobles getting bribed all the time on sejmiks which was why Constitution of 3rd May deprived nobility without lands ("gołota") in Polish from rights to vote in sejmiks and thus from right to vote overall. So you can, theoretically, get an succesful Poland-Lithuania, but that won't be "Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth" just "Kingdom of Poland" with Grand Duchy of Lithuania as one of it's constitutive elements (sort of like Hungary-Croatia relationship).