I really want to like lancer, but it feels like the lore as presented in the core book is built to remove stakes altogether. The fact that cloning/overwriting (I forgot the actual word for it) is there as a get-out-of-death-free-card feels bad. Not having to tape my mech together after a fight because printers feels bad. The ability to just build a new mech entirely from scratch at no cost to the pilot takes the bite out of building a mech.

All of these things are addressed in the core book, but in whole other places in the book. I acknowledge that the lore is influenced by the writers' political beliefs (which I agree with for the most part), but the whole reason any fictional worlds are interesting is purely because of their flaws, and the book says "yeah shit sucks out in the frontier, but we're not gonna provide the gm with any mechanics to reflect that and just tell you how Union is".

I fundamentally disagreed with that approach, and trying to create mechanics that reflect a shitty frontier was way more up-front work than I could handle when I wanted to run it. I got burnt out before my campaign even started.

Comp/con is the bee's knees tho.