I don't think the requirement is strictly necessary because in practice it is regularly the other way around: successful exam takers were relegated to regional governorship while the central government was filled with favorites and cronies. There is however no mechanic preventing chars with low learning from being rulers. At best, employing people with low learning should only invoke some mallus, although since there is no confucian religion it's hard to say who this would apply to. In terms of realism, it's probably more important is to prevent local governors to also serve as councilors, but this obviously prevents players from playing as councilors.
We can't really implement this another way.
- Making it impossible to land people with low Learning would require tearing out the whole title grant system, which isn't on the table.
- Adding AI logic to make it unlikely for it to land someone with low Learning would also be impossible without tearing out the title grant system. Also, the player would be able to ignore it, and having the player and the AI play by different rules isn't great.
- Adding a penalty for landing people with too low Learning would result in the AI repeatedly shooting itself in the foot as it wouldn't understand the penalty, and letting the AI ignore it makes it a player-only punishment (which isn't something people tend to appreciate).
- Preventing local governors (a.k.a. vassals) from serving on the council at all times would limit both the vassal and the liege in various ways (e.g. the liege can't put vassals on the council to prevent factioning or because they've got really good skills in some category, and vassals can't meddle in votes), and it would make it much easier for the liege to fill the council (or a sufficient number of seats to force through a vote) with yes-men and to replace anyone that starts to be owed Favours or that owes Favours to someone problematic.
- Adding AI weights to make it assign/not assign certain people to the council isn't possible, unlike a blocker.
As for what Confucian is in Tianxia, that's a bit messy.
We used to have a Confucian religion (and some other religions that also no longer exist) in the removed Daotic group along with Taoist, but then JD forced us to move the Taoists over to the Eastern group because vanilla did that and we'd violate the modding rules if we didn't follow suit. Keeping the Daotic group without Taoist being part of it wasn't something we wanted to do, so we had a discussion internally about whether merging it with Eastern or removing it was preferable, with the latter option winning out in the end due to various reasons, one of which was that the religions in question were basically entirely flavourless and there being plenty of other new religions that also needed flavour (and we also plan to expand on the Taoists, as vanilla hasn't given them much). It is possible that we'll reconsider the decision to remove those religions (in which case they'd end up in the Eastern group) once we've fleshed out the other religions (and various other things), but we're not going to reach that point anytime soon due to both having a rather small active dev team and having other priorities (in particular, filling in various start dates is very high on the list).
However, the matter gets a bit more confusing when you look at what vanilla does in some places; China is normally Taoist in vanilla, and so is the WP, with the latter being a Confucian Bureaucracy and the former having a similar government type (there are some differences between vanilla's Chinese Imperial and Confucian Bureaucracy, but they're similar on many points), CK2's Taoist converts to EU4's Confucian, and the random Han Taoist teacher that can appear can be instructed to teach your child the Confucian Classics. It isn't terribly surprising that vanilla has done things that way, since adding more than one religion for China would have been a significant amount of work for very little gain (as China isn't on the map and there barely is a Taoist presence on the map under normal circumstances), though it is something we perhaps should improve upon if we decide to add back the Confucian religion, as the Taoist religion is something that's related to the Far East and thus something we're not necessarily opposed to changing from vanilla.
Of course, there's a rather noticeable problem that would arise if we added the Confucian religion and made China properly Confucian in the starts where that would be the case: JD would no longer unlock China in those starts, since JD only unlocks the Taoist religion instead of the whole Eastern group. We've got no problem with other DLCs than JD being relevant for some of our stuff (all of the religions we've added at this point require something else (RoI for Shinto, tOG/HF for various pagans)), but due to a lot of the stuff that's used for China being heavily based on JD features it is locked to JD (and we won't remove the lock, rewrite it to be less based on JD, or create non-JD versions of it), which means you'd effectively need two DLCs to properly unlock China. Obviously, even with the current setup there will be start dates in which JD is insufficient to play China (Yuan will be Buddhist, as that's historical; that was a large part of the decision to not restrict Chinese Imperial and Confucian Bureaucracy to only Taoists), but having China unplayable with just JD during a bit over half a century (1279 -> 1337; you can't start later) is rather different from that being the case during all/most of the game.
Regardless of what we may or may not do in the future, the way it is handled right now is essentially this:
- If you're Chinese Imperial, you're on board with Confucianism at least as far as "Meritocracy good!" goes. Depending on your actual religion and how zealous you are, you might not agree with other aspects of Confucianism, but it won't affect how you govern your realm.
- If you've got the Confucian Bureaucracy government, you're operating as if you approve of "Meritocracy good!", though as a vassal you might not necessarily agree as much as if you're the top liege (and, come 6.0.1, you don't have to have as high standards as your liege when it comes to councillors) even if your options for escaping it are fairly limited. Again, your actual religion and zeal might affect how much you care about other aspects of the Confucian religion.
- If you've Japanese Imperial, you're on board with "Meritocracy good!", but even though you might tolerate some Confucian practices you're still the head of the Shinto religion and thus you presumably will adhere to it over Confucianism if they're not in agreement about something.
- If you're Taoist and don't have Chinese Imperial or Confucian Bureaucracy, you get the current Taoist stuff, which sometimes might be a tad Confucian because of the aforementioned vanilla conflation.
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