But any oligarchic society - control by a small group by means of power, be it economic or military - never ends well. And oligarchic societies who begin to relax their iron grips rarely survive in their original form.
Pardon the question, but I have to ask, is there
any polity in the BTU that
isn't an oligarchy of some kind?
It seems to me that the clans are slapped with the 'unrealistic social dynamics' thing rather unfairly, because
all the factions in the BTU are unrealistic. Heck, by 3150 I'm pretty sure the Combine has done medieval Japanese feudalism longer than
actual medieval Japanese feudalism ever lasted in history, and that was hardly a stable structure during the time it actually
did exist. Considering that some of these states have been going on since the 2200s, they are all vastly more stable than nearly every state in human history.
Going back to the original question, I'd say that all the clans are enriched by the diversity of their cultures, to a point. The Falcons wouldn't be 'clanlike' if there weren't 'unclanlike' clans to contrast against, and those other clans wouldn't be as interesting if they didn't have stick-in-the-mud conservatives like the Falcons to be different from and all the clans were like 'you do you, man'. Part of the problem with having too many clans is that the writers start running out of differentiating traits to give them, so they start blurring together; the Ice Hellions, for example, came across as basically Smoke Jaguars on (more) meth, so there's a balancing act that has to be made.
If you'll excuse the tangent, I didn't get it for a long time, but I finally realised the thing about the BTU: it wasn't meant to be a wargaming universe where all the different players identify themselves with all the different factions, but a role playing universe where there are definite good guys and bad guys, and you're not meant to identify with the bad guys. The 3025 Draconis Combine and CapCon aren't meant to be sympathetic or have redeeming features; all 3050 clans other than Wolf are supposed to be either evil crusaders or craven cowards for letting the evil crusaders invade. KSD's rise to power seems utterly incomprehensible because they gave her so few positive attributes it doesn't seem she could brush her teeth without cackling maniacally and twirling her moustache; it's mind-boggling that Cameron St. Jamais's facial hair
doesn't include a moustache. And let's not even go into Mad Malvina, Deranged Daoshen or Crazy Caleb.
But the funny thing was, players identified with those factions anyway, whether it was because they were 'cool bad guys' or because a writer gave a sympathetic view of them, so there was demand for elaboration of all the different clans, among other factions. All these clans seem 'unclanlike' because the original clans weren't meant to be seriously different to begin with: who really cares what tribe an orc is from in D&D? 'Sympathetic' is antithetical to the original narrative concept of the clans, so any sympathetic traits can seem 'unclanlike'; similarly, because almost every villain faction in the BTU is some variation of oppressive conformist, simply having any differentiating traits at all can seem like a deviation from the hypothetical clan norm.