Yeah, I've had disagreements like that all the time. One guy thinks that God makes the flowers grow and the other guy thinks its photosynthesis.
I can't debate someone's faith and I won't debate these "imaginary" experts you've read about. I can tell you what Joseph Stalin said. But if you don't trust his words, even though you were quoting his son, just a few posts before, then you and the "Pearl Harbor" guy have a lot more in common than you might imagine.
You are making a straw-man of my actual positions, and confounding different issues. The game, as it stands, has only one kind of American intervention that matters, and it is an actual invasion of Western Europe. Lend-Lease is not modelled to full effect (not even close). I pointed this out a thousand posts back. The USSR the game offers is one where lend-lease comes "built-in," it's not optional.
Without lend-lease, the USSR would have been in a bit of a pickle. But that's not what an American intervention means, in game-terms. It means having a second front. The USSR should be full well able to beat the Germans without a second front, which is what the game offers now. Cutting their officer rate across the board would make this virtually impossible, for an AI anyway.
Only as part of a game-wide make-over, with appropriate modelling of lend-lease, recalibrated allied AI and a plethora of other things would weakening the USSR make any sense.
Admittedly, maybe I overstated the inherent power of the USSR. I should have made the distinction earlier, between lend-lease and the second front, before I was trolled into that unsourced statement (then again, defending the in game status quo of a strong USSR, the burden of proof isn't on me anyway).
By the way, who on earth quoted any of Stalin's sons?