I hope "Sirlins" do find Dominion off-putting. If they're put off enough, I'll never have to deal with them or their bullshit. For people who are supposed to be subscribing to the tenet "play the game that everybody else is playing", they sure seem to whine a lot about making games more "competitive". I dunno, sounds like scrub talk to me.
If you want to play the equivalent of "no items, Fox only, Final Destination" in Dominion—and I'm not saying you do, but if you did—I think the closest analogue you could get is to find the set of 10 Kingdom cards that most rewards skill, and only ever play that board. Just play the crap out of it. That way you never have to experience the endless variety that makes Dominion so much fun. It's not a perfect analogy, of course, but you can't get a perfect analogy between a fighting game and a turn-based card game.
So yeah, for those who are looking to remove luck or whatever from Dominion, I say, go play Chess. Better yet, go play Chess 2! It's what Sirlin would do.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I suppose I might as well comment, since it seems everyone else is too busy falling for the prescriptivist bait and some points got lost in the shuffle.
First, my term "Sirlin" was an unfortunate choice, because I see it connotes certain negative aspects -- like his personality -- that are not essential to the psychology I meant to describe. I don't think it is necessary that someone who views games as intellectual sport is also an asshole. For example, I am a poor chess player, but I've played some live tournaments and a lot more online, and I've met a lot of players who are competitive and "play to win." But most are also kind people and good sports.
So, if you want to design games that are not meant primarily for people with a "competitive" mindset, that's totally cool. I just wish the justification was more about having a design philosophy that differs from theirs and less that you don't care about pleasing them because they're jerks, because I don't think that is usually the case. Maybe "competitive" is not even the right word. The mindset I'm trying to get across is about valuing certain game design principles, not cut-throat behavior and rudeness.
The "no items, Fox only, Final Destination" meme began as a parody of "competitive" Smash, and I wouldn't take it too literally. In any case, I don't think people with a "games as sport" mentality necessarily dislike variety. I would guess most welcome it. More variety means more strategic options and a richer game, right? Of course there are sometimes tradeoffs -- maybe there's a point where there's so much variety you just can't balance the game properly -- but personally I welcome variety.
Your comment about people wanting to remove luck from Dominion is interesting. There's been a lot of a good discussion on previous pages about this, but I'll reiterate some points briefly. I think we should distinguish between a game having elements of chance, and those elements of chance affecting the outcome of the game in a way that makes in-game decisions seem useless or purposeless. For instance, I don't know much about poker, but I've heard it said that the same players tend to rise to the top of tournaments despite the nominally large role chance plays in the game. This makes sense to me, because even though a single hand might be decided largely by chance factors, over the course of thousands of hands -- if skill has any impact on the outcome at all -- the better player should win out. So while poker is a game of "chance," the variance in outcome is actually quite small relative to the skill of the players and their decisions. (If anyone here plays poker competitively, please weigh in.)
However, if elements of chance frequently affect the outcome of the game to a large enough degree that one player simply can't win even if she plays optimally -- or more realistically, if the skew is quite large but not 100% decisive -- someone with a "games as sport" mindset may find that off-putting. This is more or less what I take Awaclus's point 5 to be.
Of course, we all have different tolerances for chance affecting game outcomes relative to player decisions, and that tolerance can't be zero unless you want to always play deterministic games because horrible draws and freak events will inevitably occur. But I do sympathize with Awaclus's preference here, at least on some days.
(And yeah, Chess 2 seems to misunderstand chess. If you want a variant that fixes some perceived defects, I'd go with Chess960 as mentioned earlier.)