Because it takes a lot of time?
I think that with the rest of the clan pitching in -- this is sorta their schtick too, as much as it is our brainchild-- we'll be able to squeeze this in in-between running projects, plots, plans, and researching Interesting Things. I don't think the time constraints are problematic in that aspect, and we can always get someone to work on that.
I think the argument is that sealing takes time that could be spent on building up the merchant empire. Sealing does help on the personal power front and could get us a SINs to protect Leaf, so it can get ward off aggression.
Merchant empire makes the desire for wars that disturb trade less attractive before seal defenses even come into play. It's a softer deterrent.
Cool. So since I wanted to do that's one of the reasons I wanted us to spend less time on sealing.
The long and short of it is that we're not very optimized for running this sort of thing.
From an IC standpoint, a pile of our XP is currently spent on combat and sealing. So we're not going to be as good at this sort of thing as Mari would be at handling social aspects, or Keiko would be at handling logistical aspects. (I don't think either would object to helping.) We can surely optimize things here and there by doing stuff personally--Hiveminds crazy-- but I don't think thats going to be much of an increase.
From an OOC standpoint: I don't think we really want to get into the weeds on Merchant Empire Economics stuff. The James Bond-ish intrigue stuff, sure. I'm all down for having Hazou do some spymaster crap with Mari.
The main catch-22 is: The current status quo is way more "Social specs = god" than it was before for us. Unfortunately we sunk most of our XP up til now into punching the shit out of things, and about1/5 to a quarter of the overall is in Sealing stuff (that we haven't gotten much use out of because we keep doing things because our Sealing stat is too low). We can increase overall gains by fixing this with " Pay 100 XP to become 'Kagome but not as good' in one part of the mechanics -> Sink a total of 165 XP into Calligraphy to get good at another -> CR Rush + Shadow Clones (10 months) -> Begin piling XP on socials, Sealing, Prophet of the Out, and Even More Socials like its going out of style, filling the pyramid with Earth jutsu, socials, and Cryptography (Do this for pretty much the rest of the quest) ." Since doing that is more or less the most efficient long-term and short-term strat en masse for bumping Socials up to snuff while maintaining the fulcrum that is bossing reality around with an inkbrush.
Short-term: With this trajectory we would want to spend time researching stuff that a) Uplifts (Bigger Earth Domes are pretty much "Here is a free house.", purifiers are great, stuff that heats homes [and could be used to boil water] would be great, civvy storage seals would be great) or b) acts as +1 equipment to our combat stats (since we aren't leveling them with XP, we can offset this by upgrading our equipment).
Long-term: I'm decently sure that the only way we're going to "win" (post-scarcity society, necromancy enabled, these nations no longer exist in the village system and are one super nation led by a charismatic Nice Guy leader a la Naruto) is through the application of a) Sealing and other misc. research stats , b) Socials, c) Forbidden Lore. Forbidden Lore is basically "Have high enough socials to convince folks in the know to spill the beans" , as well.
tl;dr: We aren't Nagato, but this at least lets us copycat his build somewhat, just with "God-stat" instead of "God-bloodline". He pretty much trivially won the game --YMMV on whether his endgame plan was brilliant, completely fucking nuts, or none of the above-- just by making two handfuls of friends and acquiring the right shinies, so whatever he did must've worked out pretty well. Lets do that (except with the obvious optimizations) and we're probably good to go no matter what actually end up having to do.
