Saying the community self-regulates is not the same as saying it has a problem. Self-regulation is the means by which it is not a problem.
It's not really about whether it's a problem; I'm asking a question here about the mechanics of the game. If you're discussing the qualities of certain cards, to say "well yeah but we just don't play with those cards" completely dodges the question and is, essentially, irrelevant. It's a completely nonsensical line of reasoning.
Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm not trying to restate any arguments as straw men, I guess I'm just struggling to understand certain other people's confusion), but you seem to be saying that if I have a problem with faster ramp, I should play games with other people not using faster ramp, and under the impression that I'm simply advocating for that ramp to be banned? If so... fine? But that's kind of missing the point again. For the purposes of this discussion, at least, "ban all ramp in EDH" and "I will play a version of EDH with my mates where ramp is banned/soft-banned" are the same; in either case, I'm playing a game with less ramp. My question is more about the relative merits of playing without that ramp in the first place.
It's also kind of a slightly philosophical one about game design, and whether these cards are tuned correctly, and what it actually means to be correct. I'm not sure that everyone here agrees but I still believe it to be the case (and in fact the common consensus) that the better ramp we have, including the regular non-fast-mana is really good, and more powerful than it needs to be (again, compare/contrast Standard) but there are reasons why that might still be desirable. I was hoping people might be interested in discussing those reasons and perhaps helping me decide whether any of them are particularly strong or not.
Please give me one more
opportunity to restate this in a way that may be more comprehensible.
Forget all that rubbish about what you play in your playgroup or whatever; imagine you're a game designer at Wizards and someone's just invented mana rocks (or, heck, the whole notion of ramp) for the first time. You're trying to decide what the final mana rocks should look like (or they could be Rampant Growths, whatever, but let's just stick with rocks without loss of generality) and, for the sake of this thought experiment, let's assume there aren't already mana dorks or whatever to compare too. What CMC do you put these rocks at? Zero is a valid answer - that was what they did first, after all! But they decided that that was too low. Why? How about 1? 2? 3? 4? And why?
This is really the question I was trying to ask: would people put rocks in the same place they are now (which is about 2, ish, setting aside Sol Rings and other fast mana) if we didn't already have the guilty knowledge that we do? And what are the factors that would affect that decision? To me, the whole point of ramp is to provide a trade-off between playing it and not, so I'd want to try and
balance them around the point that the pros and cons to using them are roughly on some kind of a par (that's what I was trying to say in my first post; and, again, compare/contrast with Standard), but what I was trying to ask is, do people think there are other factors that should be taken into account?
That seems like a pretty simple question to me, albeit not necessarily one with a simple answer.