I was implying that NA has more player-owned towns and castles because nobody was making a concerted effort to sign for defense on land-grab sieges until Occitan appeared from the ether, and that those "harder-to-capture" fiefs aren't all that hard to capture when you have most NA strat players willing to sign for you or at least not sign against you. The further implication there is that we don't actually shun carebear alliances.
Yeah, there are plenty of "why even bother?" siege "defenses," ain't gonna lie. But we still got some large fights here and there, so it isn't like it's actually dead. And we had NA-based drama with wars brewing before EU came and potentially put a stopper to NA v. NA battles for the time being.
While we have had large alliances in the past (FCC, CC, Gobblins, VE, chadzian Empire, etc.), none of them (except gobbs, maybe) had ever individually been such a large percentage of the population as UIF and this new EU faction are. Back when we had mega-NA alliances there were always enough players on the opposing side to make things interesting. EU's strat has been entirely run by one faction for the past several iterations of strat. So sure, we've had NA shitposters call some of our factions "carebear alliances," but EU's has always put ours to shame, namely since ours were carebear alliances in name alone, and only called such in diplomacy threads started by the opposition. The key difference being that we had opposition that could even put up a fight, while EU never really did, and anyone not in the carebear alliance was left to fight over the scraps of the map they didn't bother ruling over.