When you were designing Dark Ages, how differently designed were the 2 attacking Looters trying to be compared to regular Curser cards? In your mind, could they have fit well enough into a set that didn't contain ruins and just given curses instead?
It looks like Ruinses became a thing in April 2010. Of course Dominion at the start had Confusion, a blank card you could give out instead of Curses; that's 2006. It's 2024 now. It's going to be hard to remember what was going through my head when making those cards.
The first card was Marauder: Gain a Silver, each other player gains a Rubble. On the next page they were Ruinses instead of Rubbles. And there's a second card: Barbarian. It's called Barbarian, but it's also the card that eventually came out with that name, except it doesn't have the +$2 and it costs $4 and also it uses Ruinses instead of Curses.
So sure, you could do these cards with Curses - and Barbarian is just such a card.
My guess is, I was happy with "it gives out Ruinses instead of Curses" being different enough from cards that give out Curses, and wasn't doing any specific other things to distinguish them from Curse-givers. They gave out Ruinses, those aren't as bad as Curses but are still pretty bad, and you go from there.
The idea to Ruinses is, that an awful card that does something is more interesting than an awful card that doesn't. Curse has the benefit of simplicity, for a game that after all may not get any expansions if it's too complex; Ruinses have more interactions, and it's fun when well you play the Ruins and it does a little something for you. It's a different experience from "this card just does nothing." This premise didn't require anything more of the cards generating the Ruinses though. Since Curses are worse, I couldn't just make it e.g. "+2 Cards, hand out Ruinses" at $5 because it would look stupid next to Witch. They had to carve out their own shapes and so they did.
