The thing about why people are questioning your ability as a player is that the reasons for your wanting to instigate the changes are related to ability.
I'll assume that it's not an attempt to discredit me and avoid the issues at hand. Nevertheless, you'll never prove a rule is bad by questioning my motives. Even if I were a slack-jawed dimwit who was raging against a couple losses and had decided to change the game for his own benefit, these rules would perform the same function and have an existence of their own apart from me, and function the exact same as if I were the most brilliant game designer in history.
Your argument as that these rules, compared to the existing rules, make it too easy to play. By eliminating the random element, a player of lesser skill is on equal footing with a player of greater prowess. My argument is that by leaving the random factor in, a player of greater prowess is dragged down to a player of lesser skill's level. I think my argument is a bit simpler than yours.
BFG is a strategy wargame. There are two factors that influence the outcome of the game: the player's decision making and chance (dice). You make the decision to shoot but the dice will determine the level of success you achieve. Canny players pay careful attention to probability and use their knowledge of probability to inform their decisions. With most actions in the game, there are varying levels of success. When shooting you can completely whiff it, get about average or you can give them a good pounding. While on BFI you can save against every single hit, save only some of them or take every hit just like you hadn't braced. Over the length of a game, you will roll enough dice that they will likely start to even out a bit (but not always).
I don't think that anyone will argue that movement isn't the most important decision that a player makes in the game. Movement effects firing position, and firing position can positively or negatively effect damage. The measure of a player's skill is whether they can outmaneuver their opponent to get the best firing position and then exploit it. After all, that's how you win games.
Ship movement, for the most part, is very predictable. There are very restrictive rules regarding how a ship moves. There are minimums or maximums for movement distance, they have to move straight ahead for a period of time and can make fairly narrow turns (4 turns to rotate 180*).
How SO fit into this is that they are the very basis of strategy for the majority of the fleets in the game. They give a player options so that their battle plans can be somewhat unpredictable for the opponent. Normally they only turn 45*, but all of the sudden they turn 90*. Normally they only move 20cm, but those ships just moved 36! They have to move at least 10cm, but it just stopped completely. These SO add an element of freedom to the overall strategy of the game beyond the usually restrictive movement framework.
So, as a player, you can utilize SO to enact a plan. The problem is that SO use Ld tests. Ld tests are pass/fail and at most Ld values has a significant chance of failure. What's worse is that once you fail one, your whole fleet loses the ability for the rest of the turn. You've made the decision on what you want to do, for better or worse, before you've cast the dice. If you're a skilled player and have created a good strategy that will work, the only thing that the Ld mechanic can do is
remove your ability to enact your strategy. This saves your opponent's butt. Of course if youre a bad player and have a terrible plan that will get you killed, failing a Ld for a SO that was a bad idea saves your butt and keeps you from losing. The only function of the Ld check for SO is to prevent a players strategy from functioning as intended. This rewards bad players and punishes good players.
This is why I'm against using random chance to limit the use of SO.
I can see your point that if you fail a Ld check, a good player will come up with a new plan. I have some issues with that idea. Failing a SO check means that you have no more options. There's no difference between failing an SO check and not having a plan to begin with. You'll have to sit on your hands through your turn and your opponents and hope that the consequences of doing nothing smart don't ruin your hopes for victory. But often they do.
I've seen very good players fall for obvious ploys not because they didn't see the ploy or know they needed to avoid it, but rather because they failed their first or second SO check and their fleet was torn to bits before they had another opportunity to react.
If anything your ability to adapt will be tested MORE if players could perform a couple of SO automatically per turn. First, you'd still have all the randomness in shooting that can make you change your plans. But now you have an opponent that can successfully perform a strategy that you need to react to!
The old adage that battle plans never survive contact with the enemy is about having to change your strategy to count theirs, not your army turning retarded and not doing what it's told.
You want to remove turrets vs AC or torps. Why?
Because it's an antiquated rule that should have gone away with the limits they placed on how much AC you could have on the board at one time. It takes A LOT of ordnance poured onto a single ship before the decision on what to fire at makes a difference. In fact, the amount of ordnance you need to dump on a ship before the defender's decision matters is potentially enough to destroy the ship. And even in those situations, the decision is a no-brainer based solely on what you see on the board at the time you make the decision. The boost that combined ordnance gets is so ridiculously small that it's not worth considering. Losing it isn't going to change a player's decision to hit a target with torpedoes and AC simultaneously one bit.
I don't think that it hurts the game being in it. I just think that it's so insignificant that it's pointless and can be deleted without changing anything about the game.
I don't even get up to now why you want to change boarding from a 1 dice mechanic to a multi-dice mechanic. How does this fix things? As it is, the current rule is a hard rule to understand but I think it is more how they presented the rule. As a comparison, your rules don't make it simpler and as they say adds more luck into it by rolling multiple dice, something you wished to avoid in the first place as had been pointed out.
I want to change it to a multi-dice mechanic specifically to limit the amount of random chance in boarding. There's nothing more random than a single die roll. The more dice, the more predictable the result. It drastically cuts down on the randomness in boarding.
Also, psychologically, its easier for the human brain to count than add. And this system is intuitive. And it doesn't have any strange situations where weaker ships have a marked advantage over stronger ships. And after lots and lots of trials everyone who has used it or even tested dice is MUCH happier with the results than with the previous system.
Lastly, Warp Drive Implosion. I don't get why one is so afraid of this.
It's not fear. It's because it's an element that only serves to screw a player hard. Its dice screwing a player at that, not their opponent's decision. It can cost good players the game or hand it to a bad player.
The thing is what you want taken out is something that needs a 6 rolled first followed by a 12 rolled. It shouldn't be happening every game.
There's no first 6 to be rolled. Every time a ship dies or a hulk takes damage, you roll 2d6. If it's 12 its a WDI.
Lets say that 8 ships die during the course of a game (ignoring hits to hulks). There is a 20% chance that there will be at least one WDI. It's not as unlikely as it seems. We see one every 3-4 games here, which looks to be about average.
And even then, here where I play, both players actually anticipate getting a 12 on the crit table with glee!
Cinematic explosions are cool. Maybe this can be done another way.
If you really want to make changes, make a change because it is a bad rule and not just because it is luck based or you don't like a result.
We changed Ld for SO and the WDI because they are bad rules. We left gunnery unchanged because it's a good rule even though it has a lot of luck involved and we may not like the results.
