Wasn't this something you could do in Conqueror? And I'm guessing the idea is to bring it back, without the "somewhat deep in chapter 3" requirement. If we can get BoS, supermutant etc units to recruit, it wouldn't be a stretch to have them fight for a different faction.
I'm mostly looking at it from the position of "how much of a performance/coding nightmare it would be to implement" but I'm not an actual dev and something tells me they have a different line of thought
Not entirely sure, I feel like the focus shifted mostly to the story with SS2. When people run into mechanics, they complain lol. Not everyone of course.
You're right of course, but what's the point in stating that so many times. Devs know of the HQ problems. I'm sure at least some of it can still be explained better (or some mechanics dropped entirely - for instance, scrap logistics suck and recruitment to HQ objective could be dropped to 8-10 people instead of 15, while still making sense for the story) and hopefully it will but there's a lot on their plate.