This truly could do with a threadlock. People will make up their own opinions based upon ingame encounters. @"Anton Okunev" - I appreciate what you're trying to do; those that have legitimate nonaggressive concerns have been given detailed responses. Those that delve in trollish conduct do so in an empty chamber. No sense reasoning with those who seek to win attention.
Edit:
@Reeves I suppose it could be called erosion of vanilla for a faction to evolve angle from one point of view or another. However twenty six years have passed in the discovery universe, and almost two decades in the real world timeline. What the Unioners have done is an attempt to build on Vanilla, not change it; but we also have to fit in with other factions within the universe - play for the discovery we find ourselves in. Syndicalism is implied by the faction name and the history - we built around the interpretations of every infocard we could scrounge up. We also tried to use the lore of pre-existing Unioner attempts with the consent of their respective members. Then we wanted to give our members creative freedom from there. Every faction has evolved from a vanilla standpoint, including Xenos; both in reputation and in presentation. Gallia is a massive modification to vanilla, along with the role of Zoners. Do we exist in the same universe as vanilla, or a different cannon entirely, as the mod is not a finished product created by Digital Anvil? It's an interesting set of questions with no particular answer. It helps that we're not trying to represent all Unioners, but a conglomerate of Unioner-aligned groups. Could another Unioner faction develop if a large group of players wanted to get together and shape the NPC group's direction? Certainly.
Ultimately factions try to do what they believe their players will enjoy, and people play in those groups because they want to build something with that vanilla idea as a baseline. Factions change according to their members; what IMG is doing right now would be one example. Or in Gallia, because of overall mod storytelling.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)