I spend quite some time on the Geek as well and I found it very interesting to read through those topics.
Nothing like a good old flame war on the internet, almost as good as an Agatha Christie novel.
It's just too bad that it turned out this way. There are no winners here, only losers. I don't know what the author's reasons were for his absence, but I'm glad Donald doesn't let us in the dark. There are some rule problems every now and then, but what do you expect with > 150 cards??
I like how in the community we all go from: "It's broken!" to "It's worthless!" to somewhere in between.
And even if we don't like some of the cards, we can always choose to play without them and choose a different subset.
For all I care he could invent a card called "Golden Snitch" which costs 50$, but immediately wins you the game. If I don't like it, I can leave it out.
Besides, Dominion is mostly symmetric. Sure, attack cards favor the first player because of the shuffle timings and Smugglers favors second, but we all get even chances to go first or second. In fact, the previous losers are helped, because they can start the next game as first player.
I understand it's really really hard to create an asymmetric game and the problem with a board game is that it's set in stone. The cards are already printed. With a computer game, a company can release a patch to fix those issues. If we look at Diablo II, this game was originally released in 2000, but kept receiving patches until 2009!