I had few, though I don't think they count as "High Lord level":
Yeah, I don't think those work either. Besides, the answer to the first is pretty obvious one which can be found in the Informationals about the Machine Spirits, so Panda should know the answer to it already:
The Machine Cult also teaches of the evils of alien technology, the grave heresy of the Xeno that perverts the noble Machine Spirit and denies it of its rightful observance and care. It teaches that alien technologies do not possess Machine Spirits, or that their Machine Spirits are broken and tortured things, not rightfully ordained in the order of Deus Machina. Only Deus Machina can bestow the Soul, and so only Deus Machina can provide the divine ignition that births the Machine Spirit; all alien works are, then, soulless by definition, and if stolen from the works of the Ancients it is a perversion of the True Path.
So in their eyes, alien technology can be powerful, but it is evil, unholy, perverted, etc. and should be destroyed. But as it is pointed later in the same topic:
The Machine Cult, ultimately, teaches that the Machine Spirit is wholly human, that Deus Machina is wholly human.
They are wrong, but only partially.
The origins of the Machine Spirit are shrouded in myth and mystery, but can be considered a relatively recent phenomenon in the histories carved into the Sea of Souls, later the Warp. First appearing almost forty thousand years ago, tools and machines carefully tended to and maintained over years, decades, often centuries of good service would be imbued with almost a mind of their own, one that yearned to perform their purpose and which, well tended, would do it well. This was a commonality amongst all cultures, across all corners of the Galaxy, with the notable exception of the Eldar, whose perculiarities precluded the appearance of these animisms in their technology.
Yet this does not matter in this context, because millenia of doctrine and tradition says otherwise. And we are not going to be changing their minds about it.
And the second question is irrelevant in getting anything more than getting a couple of more spiteful words in. Compassion and basic human decency are seen as a weakness in the majority of the Machine Cult. And innovation and spreading of knowledge are something they are vehemently opposed in their doctrine, so we would be talking to a stone wall.
Basically, changing the core beliefs of someone's worldview is a near-impossible task on the best of days, and this case we are not only endangering that. We are also threatening the pillars of their industrial and technological near-monopoly, which is probably almost as worse.
So even if we somehow managed to convince whole Adeptus Mechanicus that many of the core tenets of their belief system are wrong... Would even the majority
still be willing to relax their monopoly? Or would vast amounts of them fall into even worse state, into the lure of the Chaos and the Dark Mechanicum, or some genuinely dangerous and/or subversive alien technologies made out of nightmare fuel?
Because most of the members of the Adeptus Mechanicus are not anywhere near good people due to the Machine Cult shaping them like that. And taking away their beliefs is unlikely to suddenly change that.
Anyway, rant over about that. I'm still trying to think topics that would work. Preferably on potential topics for future collaboration where our interests
do align even partially. But somehow I'm hitting empty, if not counting the topics that we currently cannot touch upon, like the Wayfarers.
