I like your H/P idea, I don't your island stuff. But that has no bearing on this feature request. I see no need for it, thus I see no need for an alternative. The alternative is play the game and figure out for yourself what their political power is.
The island thing is what I think should have been tried
before the the nuclear option aka the glacier experiment. The problem they were addressing was that the nobles:realm rate was too low, it was too easy for every knight to become a lord, and the player base was dropping by about 20/month. The theory behind the glacier was oversimplistic: reduce the number of regions to force the density rate up on the surviving ones. I thought that was both heavy-handed and misguided, and I suggested several soft-hand approaches to try first before going nuclear. In the end they did take one of my suggestions, which was freezing specific regions
instead of the original plan of one who whole island.
The "no man is an island" FR was a way to encourage density, but not force it. If a realm is thinking of taking over a region, they need to weigh the pros and cons of taking nobles out of their current regions to go and manage the new one.
