i believe that through all this dicussion we can come to the core of the problem, but stating that in many other threads I will try to be as short as possible:
there is too large stability which forces those in power to be in balance, and those who attempt to shake that balance are mostly doomed, so experienced players mostly avoid that, and that leads to situation that they simply have nothing to talk about, as no effort is needed to maintain power, while those who make efforts to "cause troubles" (all initiatives always lead to that) are mostly doomed.
look at some smaller realms that are not even stable enough - leaders in power will often tend to attract and gain respect from even lowest ranked nobles, and they will be involved to at least some storyline from very beginning.
such realms, however, fail very often as they cannot compete unnaturally compact realms and overall continent stabilization mostly leads to gand of overly stable realms. in such realms, on the other hand, as there are no much stories, only buttons make difference, and people eventually give more value to buttons than they should, but as said, core reasons for that are elsewhere.
so, yes - solution is definitely more stories, not more buttons, but political stall does not allow that, and some rearrangement of buttons is needed to break that stall.
