I’m not sure why @Hansel decided to drag me into this discussion, but I might as well leave my 2 cents now that I’m here…
Okay, but what exactly is the intention of this post? People who come here to complain about Funcom’s enforcement of the rules are looking for something actionable. We might agree or disagree with them, but at least we know what they want.
I’ve read the whole opening post, and I can’t say I understand what you want. Do you want a change in the rules? Are you looking for advice on how to play on official servers? Are you looking for advice on how to find a nice private server? Are you inviting people to give you a different point of view? Or are you just venting?
I can’t really tell what we’re supposed to discuss here, if anything, so I’ll just treat it as an invitation to give you a different point of view.
And they’re not wrong, either. They have more context than you do. By your own admission, you’re new to official servers, so you haven’t had the chance to experience the things they have.
Yes, some of these people are posting in bad faith and under false pretenses. I’ve had the opportunity to witness and participate in one of those discussions, where the original poster started right off in bad faith – pretending to not understand the difference between the game and the official servers – and kept arguing in bad faith, frequently changing the story and resorting to all kinds of fallacies.
But they’re not the only ones. I’ve personally had the chance to see detailed screen shots of a base that got removed, and no one could figure out why. That was back in the days when I also assumed that everyone who complained was full of shіt, because no matter the letter of the rules, the spirit of the rules is supposed to be “don’t be a dіck to others and share the server responsibly”, so how hard can that be?
Turns out it can be pretty hard when the enforcement is totally opaque, like the system we currently have to deal with.
The rules aren’t clear, they’re simple. The difference is important.
When the rules are simple, they’re easy to understand. When they’re clear, they’re both easy to understand and transparent.
Funcom’s rules are simple, but they’re not clear. You can read them and immediately grasp their intention, but you still depend on nuance of interpretation to avoid breaking them. For example, if you shouldn’t build “more than necessary”, how do you define “necessary”?
Or to give you a different example, what is considered to be a decorative build and what is considered functional? It might seem straightforward, but it isn’t. There are all sorts of questions to ask and the answer will still depend on the circumstances.
This is where transparency comes into play and why it’s so important. When your interpretation of the nuance ends up being different from Funcom’s, the end result is that you get suspended for breaking the rules. The critical missing piece here is being able to learn from that and adjust your own interpretation.
But Funcom doesn’t let you do that. If you get suspended, you get a canned message that your access to official servers was temporarily revoked, with a generic reason such as “abuse of land claim” or something equally vague. They never tell you the concrete reason, e.g. “your cottage at such-and-such location served no purpose except to look decorative” or “you prevented a T3 armorer from spawning” or anything similarly clear.
So then you don’t get to learn how to avoid repeating your mistake. And no one else can learn from your mistakes, either.
The point I’m making here is that no one here actually knows for certain the concrete reasons for any suspension. Only Funcom has that information, and they’re not sharing it, so we’re all left guessing and interpreting the rules our own way.
If no one knows the truth, we can argue endlessly without any hope of knowing if we’re right or wrong. It’s pointless.
And all Funcom would need to do to fix this is keep a record of the concrete reason for each suspension and present it to the suspended player upon a Zendesk request. 
That’s another fun can of worms you opened there. What does “optimized” mean? Client performance depends on your hardware, and server performance is extremely hard to reason about. Of course, we have no shortage of armchair experts here on the forums who have no clue about how the servers work, but they’ll be happy to assert their opinions anyway…
And I played for months with a castle that took up slightly less than one quarter of a grid square, and had no problems with it, either. No one reported me, and I even confirmed that it didn’t have any notable effect on server performance, since that was back in the days before they disabled the debug HUD and we could actually see the server FPS and measure drops in it.
Regardless of any of that, neither you nor I can tell people “build like me and you’re not going to get suspended”, because that’s not something we can know.
If I could be bothered to go back and build the same thing on a server, I guess I could do a half-assed test by posting an open invitation for everyone to come to the server and report my build. Even that wouldn’t prove much.
Anyway, this is already long-winded, so let me try to wrap it up.
Yes, there are bases that are undeniably breaking the rules, e.g. by occupying multiple grid squares. Yes, there are people who come here to complain in bad faith.
But there are real problems with Funcom’s rules and, more importantly, with the enforcement of those rules. There are also simple solutions to those problems, but I’ve no faith left that Funcom will fix the problem.
In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if they ended up doing the wrong thing – such as implementing a building limit – just because people who keep asking for it won’t shut up about it, no matter how many times other people explain why that’s the wrong idea.
In the end, we all just keep having pointless discussions about this. But, as someone pointed out recently, it seems like that’s what these forums are for.