Yes, current situation is, once again, shitty as hell. I'm trying very hard to find something to not only crush those big alliances, but nerf big clans into oblivion as hell. Once a 30 guy clan/group/whatever is no longer more dangerous than a 10 guy clan, and clans start splitting up and fight each other, then I'm happy. Before that, I'll swing that feature&nerf hammer so long and hard until I succeed. Strat will have no future until I succeed in that.
I'm not blaming anyone in those factions, although I really don't get why you're playing the way you're playing. My limited experience in previous strat rounds in a carebear faction was like this:
Let's attack!
We can't, they'd crush us!
Then let's attack them!
We can't, they'd have allies that crush us.
So what now?
We find allies ourselves!
Needless to say, the fun was somewhat limited. I can say I never had so much fun as I have in current strat, of course with an expiry date, it's just a matter of time until we get crushed, but, even if it's only for a few days, I prefer having fun in those, than being in a soviet union simulator for half a year.
In my opinion your assumption is incorrect, and I think it's results of lack of knowledge about activities of players and their motivation to play.
Joining a large clan, who is a member of large alliance is just very comfortable for casual players cos gives possibility to participate in many big battles (big XP), with a minimal own effort on the map.
Most players have very limited free time and don't want to or can't spend a lot of time on this part of game, because then it ceases to be fun for them.
In contrast, a small group of players are mainly interested in gaming on the map, and is ready to spend all free time allowed for game, to plan and organize tasks for other people.
What's more, leaders of various factions also share their duties and exchanging information and experience, which saves time spent on the game.
Something nice for everyone. In this way, two groups of people with different approaches to the game in a natural way to combine preferences. In biology, such relationship is called symbiosis or rather protocooperation.
As you can see, assuming that you want to achieve something in strat and want big fun battles, large factions or alliances is a method to deal with "no life" behavior forced by zystem.
In fact, there even is no clan that is able to fill full roster and everyone sees it perfectly, so I don't understand how you can't see that large clans and alliances is the only way to sustain this game alive with big number of players.
Desire to artificially dividing community into groups about 10-30 ppl, artificial walls and other such ways is pure lack of understanding basic relationships between members of this community. Every battle and every war has only two sides.
Lack of more clans or alliances is result of absence more competent leaders able (skill, time, interpersonal relations etc) to build their own groups based on existing player base.
There is a lot of loud voices, but that doesn't change shape of the Gaussian curve.
We are grateful for awesome game that you've done for us, but remember that we are your beta testers,not bots kurwa mać...
And now feel free to give me over 9000 "-"