I don't feel I have been overly snippy. I said I had more respect for some complaints than others, that's a commentary on the complaints, not the person making them.
Let's say you open Platinum/nothing, you drew 5/2. I would think it's only fair that my hypothetical player 2 gets 5/2 as well. I threw a 10 card kingdom at the wall just now, it gave me Ghost ship as the best 5$ attack. So my guy gets to open Ghost Ship. Which actually puts a fancy spin on the "Witch/copper opening" debate thing since he can buy a Halfpenny. Let's buy him one, it rounds things off a whole lot.
Plat guy has exactly 16$ in his deck now, which will be spread over 3 turns. So he can get, like, 2 Ghost ships and a silver, one of his hands gets hit by the Ghost ship.
Ghost ship guy has 8$ in his deck. Man, that's like half as much money. If ghost ship doesn't miss the reshuffle, he'll take exactly 2 turns for his second run through his deck. He is likely to split that 5/3 or 4/4. If it's 4/4, he probably uses a trashed Halfpenny to shore things up and get Ghostship-power5. But let's go the simpler way and say he gets Ghostship Silver.
So, after four turns of using player two's deck, player two is ready to start a fresh reshuffle, and his deck has 9$ in it, and he has double Ghostship.
Player 1 does not even have a chance to draw a Ghost ship yet on turn 5, his deck is that bloated. Player 1's first chance at seeing a Ghost ship comes on his sixth turn, when 3 of his cards might be Ghost ship. Having an early Platinum only allowed him to catch up on Ghost ships, player 2 got two Ghost ships as well and starts playing a double Ghostship deck a turn and a half faster. Essentially, Player 1 has gotten an early Platinum, but he has reversed the attacking momentum he'd usually get, player 2's attacks are hitting player 1's purchases earlier. If the board is tilted Big Money, Player 1 probably still wins. If this is the kind of game where players are going to aim to play Ghost ship every turn though, Player 2 is positioned to do that much better now, and I'm not even convinced player 1 is winning.
That is kinda garbled, I did my best. Ghost ship is really good yeah, but all boards have a good 5$, it's different every time. Taking on halfpennies means that you have to play dominion for 5 turns without using your Action resource, instead of playing dominion that way for 2 turns. That is huge and I think it is important to appreciate. Al was not only behind on cycling because he bought a bunch of treasure, he was additionally behind because he was not using his Action resource to improve his cycling with Margrave.