DR camping is a pretty lame "skill". I mean, yeah, it still takes a bit of skill to figure out when DR tiers exit, sync up clocks, computer clock, in game clock, or whatever clock, maybe even setup alarms or notifications, and having the willpower to actually adhere to it. And then there's the part about actually hitting it on the second, and practicing it enough times to account for ping differences. The ping from my office is different from the one at home. And it's different from being on the move on a mobile device.

But what I dislike is that sometimes, you really just get a lucky break, and catch a 1a suicider in progress, boom you get 3-5k free land, that you don't even have to worry about it warring you back after farming it. That's not skill. That's just being lucky. Catching someone selling 300m bushels at $35 isn't skill either. Most people know how to catch $35 food, its just whether you are lucky enough to catch the big batches.

There are plenty of things about Primary that are far more challenging than in 1a. In 1a, the hardest thing is really camping for land and little else. And the market in Primary, omg. It is literally a different market every reset.

Another thing about 1a is the spy-op sharing. You save so many turns not having to spy-op people if other people have done it for you, or you can base it off a day-old op. You don't need too much spies, especially if you ask people in your clan to spy for you. Have no spies in Primary? Say bye to your tech (though tech stealing is removed now). You can't even grab properly if you can't spy your targets. Managing your indy-count (and thus spy count) is a very crucial aspect of Primary that many people that jump over from 1a don't initially first realize.