[swordtart]

My experience was different, we didn't so much mind the new rules being a bit out of whack, we could adapt. It helped that we were a homogenous group and were all learning the rules together. Once we decided what a rule meant, we could all follow it. We may have been wrong, but we were all wrong together.

If we spent two hours arguing a particular rule within the group (and many people would abstain), at least once we reached a consensus we could park it. We would then spend 100's of hours with that same ruling and the proportional time spent discussing the rule wasn't too much of an overhead.

Where there was conflict was when two such groups met (often just for one weekend) and had different interpretations of the rules. You could thrash it out, but you spent more time arguing about it as a proportion of the playing time.

The more groups, the less fun.

Having an "expert" arbitrate wasn't always helpful as they might be making a snap decision on something your group had discussed long into the night over several evenings (and several beers) slowly evolving the ruling based on local preferences.

Fortunately for CW we never had to deal with the "expert" situation as we were a UK group and never got to the states or got involved in the tournament and its accusations of nepotism (we just read about it in ADQ).

We did have WH40K though... the horror! ;(