My position has been fairly consistent since the support planet rule was implemented.
I have no love for support planets (particularly when they are a dedicated force set up purely to defend people) but I don't see why you can't organise yourself that way if you want to do that. Planetarion is ultimately about defending and attacking who you want - implementing what you propose goes directly against the whole point of the game.
At the time I did propose coding some kind of flagging up system or even a limit of how many times you could defend a tag in a particular time period, which is highly similar to PAs current position on the issue, 19 rounds later. I can't say I love it as much now as I did then, but at least it's a solution that actually serves to keep the whole point of the game instead of destroying it.
The sole object of the support planet rule was a political one to defeat exilition and nothing more. It's a rule born from massive pressure applied to the game admins at the time.
My original post in the thread is here:
http://pirate.planetarion.com/showpo...&postcount=151
As you'll also note, I also suggested in this thread to go after farmers and the like, as they were (and unfortunately, still are) the real problem in terms of manipulating the game's result.