The Zoner player base is much better at making other players feel they need to make way for them than actually roleplaying hardcore diplomatic mindgames. I can count the number of times my Zoner characters have been threatened by other Zoners for breaking some lame perception of Zoner orthodoxy.
No-true-scottsman might as well be no-true-zoner. The biggest enemies of the Zoner community is the fractionalism within the Zoner community. It's a faction that praises diversity, but Zoners get reluctant when other Zoners portray their zoners differently.
To players who are not Zoners, it looks baffling and gives them few points for creative engagement. That is why Zoners are near-impossible to develop for. There is no consistent narrative over a number of months, and no one member of the Zoner community agrees with anybody else. Development is also done towards storypoints. You'd think Zoners would be constantly trying to move out into increasingly more dangerous and remote regions, but Zoners do absolutely anything but this.
This comes as someone who likes the majority of current zoner roleplay.
I'd love to see Zoners trying to move into Omicron Phi, with all the resulting horror that comes of that. Zoners should always be trying to push into the unoccupied outer reaches of space, not building megacities, colonising planets then running them like houses (Zoner planetary settlements should be small and politically unfocused, like Gran Canaria was), etc.
Zoners are not a house.
Holiday, you pretty much exemplify everything I like about Zoner Roleplay. Even you've got to admit that the Zoners are about as consistent as a bag of cats. This is partially by design.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)