No worries. I’ll try to be more clear myself then. Offering a carrot isn’t the same as “pushing an agenda” nor “forcing people to play in a certain way” nor “pressuring me to take a certain action”.
The bundle of carrots is this: Massive Wealth, Massive Productivity, the Most OP Ships, Being the Most Powerful Group, Having the Most Toys, Being Practically Invulnerable to Defeat.
The ‘herding’ (or pressure, if you will), comes from the fact that all those things are maximally available in Null, and the mechanics of actually getting Null to produce them. The most OP ships take a lot of resources and ISK to build. That requires space that can farm massively productively. Massively productive farming requires Null SOV, which requires more ships and more people, which requires bigger and more powerful corps/alliances. Maximal farming requires relative safety, which requires bigger and better protected blue donuts. Fozzie Sov ensures that the ‘conquering territory’ part takes large groups with good organization, so again you need more ships, more pilots, more wealth.
All that process fuels subs and Plex sales while people are ‘climbing the mountain’. The problem with it is, once you are on top of the mountain, there’s nowhere else for you to go. You have your territory, you have your massive production, you have huge piles of the most OP ships in the game… and very little reason to do anything with them except continue to protect your mountain and farm the hell out of it. Which leads to stagnation and boredom.
At any rate, hope that makes my view of the process more clear. It’s cool if not everyone gets it or agrees. The data makes it quite obvious what the results are.