Well, I skipped KC in this game and my score almost doubled that of my opponent, who bought 6 king's courts and two margraves.
I realize there is a + buy here, but that is offset by the presence of montebank, which IMO adds to the power of sprint strategies and slows down engines too much in many cases.
My opponent even hit me with KC + montebank (another reason someone might argue KC is not skippable here) but I still won 38 - 20. That is a pretty large margin of victory.
My strategy was simple: Buy plenty of gold and a few montebanks and buy provinces before my opponent could have a megaturn.
Edit: going for Mountebank-BM is a reasonable choice, but I'm saying that when your opponent doesn't pick up Margrave until turn 17, this game isn't valid proof against going for KC. There are definitely boards where KC is skippable but I haven't seen one in a while.
That's just the thing, though, its hard to acquire the necessary cards rapidly enough. My opponent didn't pick up margrave until turn 17 because he had to worry about getting montebank and also had to worry about getting KC's.
My whole point is that it takes too long to get all the cards needed and have them all line up in place when there is montebank mucking things up.
. You can use Procession as a bootstrap early on to gain lots of Margraves and 1-2 Mountebanks, then pick up King's Court.
The temptation of "bootstrapping" one's deck with procession is notoriously swingy. It could work, or it could result in dismal failure and "KC" would be skipped, not by choice but because you wouldn't hit 7+ until it is too late. Such a strategy is far more risky than BM + montebank.
So if the bootstrapping with procession is necessary to make KC + margrave engine viable, to me, that does not make the KC strategy more enticing since the bootstrapping is itself, risky
I have won
a lot of games by skipping KC and letting my opponent fall into the trap of overbuilding with KC. Now that I am posting here I will share other examples later