[Official Event] The Alsace Passage - 2 Mar, 20:00 - 22:00 UTC

[Barrier]

You have to understand a basic trade-off between story and player agency.
The more player agency, the more likely the story goes into some contrived direction which does not fit with the overall story of the mod. This is very likely, because players generally do not have to consider the higher-order implications of their action in-rp. Moreover, it's not often fun to do this - you just log your character an rp within your restrictions to the best of your ability. It would be hard to have fun if you constantly had to think about what your actions mean for Sirius-wide geopolitics...
Of course, you also have the outcome where the story is now decided primarily oorp, due to the many alliances and opinions people have about the direction of the mod. After all, if you log enough people for a particular side, that outcome will be secured. Again however, the people logging for a specific outcome rarely care about the overall story - e.g. they want "their" side to win. Which is great, but may produce results that are quite difficult to work with. And this is very difficult to manage on the scale of disco, as opposed to say a 4-player DND game.

The current story team has decided that in order to avoid this complexity and salt that will surely flow, most story events have essentially pre-determined outcomes. The point of the events is to add flavor to what would instead be a 2-3 paragraph CNS report. For example, if we did a Dresden event, the outcomes would be what you see in the report. But you'd still be able to modify the specific details. And it would be hella fun to be there blasting down Bautzen while the big battleships blast everyone in their path.

If you want to focus on events with outcomes decided there and then, I would suggest thinking up some storyboards and make unofficial events based on them. In these events, you can set up very specific rules, slots, and outcomes. Then, as long as your rp around these is good enough, you can submit these outcomes as dev requests. But just as with SRPs, large changes require a lot of effort to be put in, so it's not guaranteed that you will get them. So you can also do what I've been doing and make smaller-scale outcomes that are more related to official faction diplomacy and government laws, which require less staff oversight.

Finally, you complaint about the Theta arc needs to go to those who responded to the red-named posts. This was indeed an opportunity to do whatever you wanted, and Outcasts chose to assault Atka, after the Corsairs chose to reinforce Theta with Vis. If these decisions were different, phase 3 would also have looked very different. But once these decisions were made on both sides and we started planning the event, the outcomes were once again decided in advance, yes.