I recall that our main complaints were due to Albert thinking Melodia needed a strong executive. Younger Quintus was way, way less monarchical and more anti-authority than older Quintus.
Not at all. Albert was a tyrant: literally. The government was of type 'tyranny.' It was the neat part of the idea: let's do something that hardly anybody does. Unfortunately he wasn't clever enough to wield that kind of power and assumed that his magnates were there to be groveling sycophants, and as it turned out, they weren't.
I didn't have the energy then to player two rulers (as Galiard was King in Cathay back then as well) so Quintus probably begged off more authority than I was prepared to take on. Not because he was anti-authority - he's the eldest son of a King.
Melodia did need a strong executive. Just not the one it had, and Quintus' entire education would've been centered on building a monarchy with built-in checks and balances, similar to Cathay's, which is really just the Monarchy version of Lasanar's government that worked very well for so long as anybody was around to enforce it.
If Melodia has mythic status it's because it was one of the earliest realms and because it really did have a neat idea behind it. I'd be down for trying that idea again except that there is way too much 21st century anti-authority in BM, particularly in Dwilight. I'm not talking about Vellos: he and Kale are at least consistent in their view that there's Republicanism and there's tyranny and nothing in between.
There were legit anti-authority movements in history, though. Bohemia and France both had them and they were both absolutely crippled by them. Bohemia was an awesome Kingdom with a lot of government tweaks we'd consider very modern, and well before most anyone else had them. Worked very well so long as they weren't being invaded by Austrians, and France for a few hundred years was more a collection of Dukes with a figurehaed (not unlike Terran) as opposed to England, where even the weaker monarchs enjoyed more power than most French Kings did up until the Renaissance.
