New features and refactoring are fine, Tom, but please keep in mind that breaking the game is worse for player retention than any shenanigans us players can do. Quite a few islands were broken for a period of days.
What we really need is a robust testing system, where features can be tested without risking breaking every other island. Maybe the devs can get their own private island to play around in?
Because just "turning on a feature and hoping it works" does not seem to be working. 
Edit: TOs on depopulated regions worked fine, and were indeed very speedy once the bugs were resolved. We should still see how long it takes to TO a big regions. Taking a large rural region should not take more than 6 days, imho. Maybe 8 to 10 days for major cities. (And of course this is just going to encourage players to completely raze regions, which is fine by me.)
The Dev's have a testing server. The nature of the game makes exhaustive testing impossible, without quiet serious code changes, which of course would in part invalidate the testing since the testing would not reflect the current code base completely. Most code changes are tested, a lot of these bug sprang from unexpected things, for instance the repair bug on Dwilight was because the realm didn't have a entry in the diplomacy table for its relationship with itself.
