Chris I'm sensing some hostility from you.
The whole point of this discussion was to get another person's point of view on why they prefer certain settings. And while I can see why you like having neutral armies, I don't think it's productive or necessary to tell another player that they'll never get good if they don't play with your settings. If you must know, I spent a long time playing with the default settings, and did well. but once I realized how much faster the game would move by taking away things like neutral armies, my enjoyment of the game increased significantly. Some of us prefer games that can end in a matter of days, not weeks
Basically, there's no need to belittle other people for having different preferences than you.
"my settings"? Those are on all but 1 ladder template.
Not hostile, blunt. Perhaps I went too far (your clan drama makes me more apt to get touchy with you). But, here is my problem. You did not accept the fact that neutral armies adds strategic value and simply say "well, I prefer not to have that added decision making". If you did, we could move on and just accept that we prefer different formats. Instead, you argued that it does nothing but slow games down, which is not true. That is why I said your ability to get good (whether you care about that or not) will be stunted. Because you don't seem to understand why those neutral armies are there at all...not whether you want them or not.
For example, I prefer straight round. But I do understand why some like weighted random because it allows 3v2 attacks to fail %20 of the time. Just because I prefer another setting doesn't mean I ignore the reason why it is used commonly.