I believe the friction is there to prevent huge alliances, also no fan of it, but that perhaps result in more hostility. But players will find their way around it.
It's like using dynamite to fix a rat problem.
An alliance ending in the middle of a war because there wasn't a diplomat to "maintain it", even if the realms couldn't be any closer and are fighting their umpteenth battle together? That's just plain stupid. Why don't we go about saying "if your realm doesn't have a trader, all food production is capped at 50%" and "if your realm doesn't have a courtier, all region stats are capped at 75%", while we are at it?
Conflict should be encouraged... But not like this. It'll just make people refuse to ever pick up the treaty system for anything other than alliances, every other "treaty" will just continue to be made as they currently are: immortal wiki pages and the like.
It's not that the idea of having people move about to maintain good relations is inherently a bad idea, it's that the number of ambassadors per continent required for it to actually be fun is much higher than what we currently have and can ever hope to have.
And all continents that I know about have plenty of wars going on, without needing the game to tell them that their long-time friendship is now null unless they redo all the pains to get it set up. Because setting up treaties really is a royal pain in the ass.
