Just to throw My own oar in here.

First I'df like to point out that data gathered from people who have modified their game to 0.5 years a turn is no diffrent than data gathered from those who have chosen to play beyond 1530. It's also no diffrent than data gathered inside a normal 2 turns per year game anyway. What matter is what happens on a turn by turn basis, NOT a year by year basis, HEll, by defualt you don't even know what year it actually IS. Most of the things that are discussed are about how many turns it takes to do somthing. For example I went on about how many turns it takes to get Merchants established in vanillia, now TB I played exactly 1 hour of 2 years a turn before going to 0.5. But changing the number of years changes nothing I was talking about. Characters age at 0.5 years per turn regardless of how many years the turn counts as.

A few other important considerations:

1. A poll a while back showed a very large percentage of the responders did not use the defualt time scale, that implies a fairly big part of the online community in fact is giving results at somthing other than the defualt timescale.

2. It takes a fairly LONG time, (in my V1.14 beta which has big AI improvments it's still a good 100-150 turns for most factions, I never played defualt long enough to see how long that took), for the AI to get upto speed, playing with more turns actually gives the AI a chance if you take your time.

3. Some people actually like to be at peace with all their neighbours for prolonged periods of time, i see no reason they should be unable to win just because they don't want to be fighting on 3 fronts all a once. Total War DOES NOT mean littrial total War, it just means your primary means of acomplishing your objective is war. If diplomacy didn't mean anything it wouldn't be in.

I myself modified it orgionally to make the years and charater ages match up. However furthar modding for my V1.14 beta to cut down blitzing speeds as well as other littile tweaks means it's fairly likliy now that I could never finish a slow campaign in 225 turns, I'd expect the 30 turns blitzer to struggle to manage under 150 turns now.

Not everyone changes the timescale to get an advantage, they often change it because of other in game changes or because they want a diffrent style of gamplay, or as in my case just to make the game make sense.