He said that religions suck by design, which, unless you're being deliberately pedantic or trying really hard to give him the benefit of the doubt, means that the dev team wants religions to suck.
I find this to be approximately equivalent with the position of those who believe that Tom has it in for them, and will deliberately change the code to ensure that their realms lose.
Sucking may not be your target, but it's an inevitable result of the means you insist to use, and the philosophy you adhere to as to how the game should handle everything religious.
Look at it this way: Nobody wants to eradicate all of the wild yews, but people's desire to use yews to cure cancer is doing precisely that. I'm not accusing you of wanting to eradicate the yews, but I am accusing you of doing precisely that by being stubbornly obsessed with not considering any other alternative to the problem at hand.
Because I can't even count the number of suggestions that have been made over the years, by various people, to improve the religion game. No structural change ever gets approved. And the answer that things are the way they are "by design" comes by way too often, as if the way there were was perfect. But the design is precisely what I believe has to be changed about religions in BM: it should be rewritten all over, in a complete overhaul. It's been done with the taxes/oaths, it's been done with sea travel, it's been done with BT invasions, it's been done with government settings, it's been done with referendums, it's been done with duchies. A whole ton of aspects of the game have dramatically evolved over the years. But not religions. They still remain the gimmicky guilds people have always complained about. Only they've become weaker, with older priests getting less hours and temples getting taxed.
