No, I wouldn’t. But there’s also no other place I would suggest, either, and that’s despite having played on several private servers and quite a bit of single-player, too.
I think you summed it up rather nicely:
Sadly, yes. That’s exactly how I’ve come to see Conan Exiles.
What I probably should have said is not that the official servers are how we’re meant to play the game, but that they’re supposed to be how we’re meant to play the game. Unfortunately, the official servers are where the metaphorical rubber of the devs’ vision meets the proverbial road of the shіtty G-Portal server specs.
Which means that the whole “survive, build, dominate” turns into “survive the glitches, build sparingly, dominate the latest exploits”, at least on PVP. On PVE(-C), there’s no “dominate” to speak of at all, but that’s a different can of worms.
That said, there’s some stuff in your post that makes me wonder whether I’m failing to understand you, or we just think too differently. For example:
Uh, yes and no. I did say that the purpose of the official servers is to experience the multiplayer aspect of the game the way devs envision it.
The building competitions are quite clearly meant to be an a showcase of individual artistic expression. There’s always the possibility that I’m missing something, but I honestly can’t see how the devs would even imagine a multiplayer experience where you have a finite map and the encouragement for an unbounded number of players to build without any limits, whether self-imposed or enforced through moderation.
Indeed, I have a feeling anyone here would be hard-pressed to find a high-pop PVE(-C) server that never wipes, and doesn’t limit either the population or how much land you can claim.
The enforcement of the rules started before the mergers. The “reporting is the new meta” trope predates mergers considerably.
This is the second time you’ve asserted that in your reply. At the risk of offending people at Funcom, which I regret, I would like to invoke a modified phrasing of Hanlon’s razor: “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence”. And I sincerely apologize for the harshness of that last word, but it was the mildest I could find to describe the continued mishandling of the game. Perhaps someone with better dominion of English could find an even nicer word.
I understand the bitterness you mention elsewhere in your post – I’m also bitter, although for different reasons – but I would argue that choosing to take them at face value shouldn’t be reserved only for posts that confirm what your bitterness already led you to believe 
I feel like you’re deliberately ignoring the explanation Umborls provided for that first post you quoted, because that explanation doesn’t fit into what you believe and you would rather think they’re deliberately stunting the official experience rather than just … blundering around.
