thats hardly related to if you re fit for being official or not what you do with the zoners....
but from the zoners point of view - ( which are not yours... )
the items requested were unreasonable and could simply not be agreed on. - not without altering the whole idea of how the zoners review their faction. ( again, not how YOU want them to review their faction )
what you asked for was about as likely to be agreed on as if zoners went to the liberty goverment and said "look here, chaps - we will now invade you on a daily basis and harrass you cause you made us abandon our liberty effords.
we now ask that you will allow our 5k whales to reach manhattan with artifacts or we will keep harrassing you"
wouldn t happen, cannot happen - we could claim "but see, we gave you a choice" - and be happy with it - retending to be the victims of circumstances and misunderstood diplomats.
you will think of it differently - ... well, you ought to ... but you should not try to label yourself a victim of zoners that "walked out of the negotiations". we have spend quite some time to consider each possibility - thought through many settings and what-if scenarios - spent a lot more time than we should have dedicated to this. - and we came to a TEAM - decision that in order to preserve what we consider canon - we simply cannot agree to anything without altering the hardcoded lore of what we build up as zoners.
and for that matter - what the majority of zoners think of what means to be "zoners" weighs a lot more than what people who have no business with zoner lore thinks they "ought to be like".
edit:
for me there is only ONE thing that qualifies a faction on its way to becoming official - and that ONE characteristic it needs to achive is :
- to be beneficial for the server community and the overall gameplay
this one is to be reviewed and considered by the majority of those that care. ( which is usually the forum readers and those that interact with the faction ). a faction can be hostile to another faction - but hostility must happen on a basis of characters roleplay. - NOT on a level / basis of out of character dislike. everything else that an official faction presents is just cosmetics.
after all, no one will really care what zoi, ship restriction, nice little images, ranks or whatever else you have. - a faction must be a positive addition to the server. - if possible one that the majority of the players appreciates in an ooc way, even if they fight it.