Just two points:
1) Tom's question about 'how does this impact fun' can be reduced to 'why is the game fun?' It's fun because a bunch of people pretend to be medieval lords and play together to either help or hinder other bunches of people pretending to be medieval lords. Fun comes from your role in either helping or hindering. If you're doing neither of those things and just occupying a hot seat, you are impeding both the help and the hinder role in the equation to a pretty significant degree, and that causes other players to resent the realm for permitting it to happen (because they don't read threads like these to know that there's very little you can do) and the game for enabling a non-entity. Where BM works is where it gives nobles on different levels of the ladder tools to push and pull on the giant power tug-of-rope that is always there -- but when somebody just really likes being called 'Duke of place' and can get away with contributing zero to the game, that has a negative-fun impact. If on the balance between that and the whole 'it's okay to not be very active' right that's acceptable, that's cool, but you are trading one for the other.
2) Pretty sure Kindara HAD an infiltrator...!
