years ago when the Clans were first introduced (a lot of us thought it was Battletechs way of introduced inhuman opponents without using aliens or androids) I recall the whole debate about the Clans superiority vs the Inner Sphere.
IIRC, when they first came back by design the only advantages the Inner Sphere had was population and the fact that the Clans did not want to wipe the humans out and just conquer the space. Then IIRC later novels seemed to nerf the Clans industrial capacity, which as I recall the debates made no sense as they had several centuries with more advanced tech to populate hundreds of planets.
To me it seemed like the initial idea of what the Clans were intended to be got morphed to an analogy more comparable to the differences between the Allies and the Axis in terms of technical and industrial capacity at the start of the war.
Personally, I always thought introducing a technology run amok enemy like the Invid inorganics (not the Invid themselves) or the Mechanoids would make for an interesting opponent in the setting rather than the Clans.
Anyway, thats all in the past.
