Yeah, we're going to scrap a lot over this.
But it shouldn't be damned difficult for France to avoid conquest. You should have to screw up in epic fashion for it to happen so quickly.
France
did screw up in an epic fashion and it did so for a complex of reasons that shouldn't be wished away by proposing that a sensible player would never have made such a blunder. They lay in limitations endemic to the French military, political, and social structures and to remove them would be to create a France that didn't exist in 1940. Taking your points in rough sequence I'd argue as follows.
It wasn't so much that France didn't want to defend Poland, but that French political and military doctrine held that the best way to assist Poland was to defeat Germany and that the best way to defeat Germany was through implementation of the Dyle Plan that you mention. I agree that this plan wasn't "defensive", but neither was it "offensive". It was, rather, "reactive" in that it proposed an offensive response to an assumed German advance through Belgium mandated by the defensive power of the Maginot fortifications. The appalling losses suffered during offensive operations in WWI hadn't extinguished the French will to attack, but they had created a social, political, and military environment which would not tolerate an "offensive posture" as that term is typically understood. The reason that France missed its "best chance for an offensive" wasn't a disinterest in Poland's fate (indeed France was strongly committed to maintaining Poland as a bulwark against communism) but that its military thinking was geared not to the punch but to the counterpunch - and the "holding back" of air power was "idiotic" only insofar as it was consistent with this stance.
At the more detailed level, I'd take issue with your observation that France was more competent in the use of armour than Germany on the basis of the historical outcome. Arras did demonstrate the potential of French armoured forces but there was only one Arras to stack up against the Meuse, Houx, Dinant, Montherme, Sedan, etcetera. French armour when skilfully employed did indeed give a good account of itself, but the manner in which it was in fact employed dovetails neatly into your assertion that "France more fully embraced Fuller's ideas of mobile warfare than Germany". I certainly think that you could make a case for this, but doing so would be to miss the critical point that the Germans didn't seek to implement Fuller's ideas but to employ instead Guderian's development of those ideas to include mobile artillery, extended radio communication, and specialised air support.
As to the modelling of "political ill-fitness" I can't agree that the minister choices provided serves to capture the scale of this problem. They're certainly a start, but the difficulties proceeded far beyond the constraints entailed there. Leaving Petain's observations aside entirely, the French political landscape from the end of the Great War through to the late 30's was marked by an increasingly acrimonious polarization of the positions adopted by the Centre-Right and the Socialist Left. This produced instances where the country was (admittedly briefly) essentially ungovernable and significantly longer periods during which industry was crippled by political-management-labour conflicts.
I'm assuming that it's these that the system is attempting to model through its 'ahistoric' IC allocation. It's perfectly reasonable to ask for France to be given her "historical" level of industry, but the task then becomes one of distinguishing between its industrial potential as represented by the periods of quietude on the industrial front and actual industrial output as affected by these conflicts. It's not a particularly elegant resolution of the challenge of distinguishing between production capacity and production output, but the strangling of production of military equipments in the later Thirties needs to be represented somehow.
Finally, I don't think there's anything wrong at all in allowing the player to benefit from hindsight, provided that the benefit doesn't demand the creation of a world that didn't exist. If you asked me to draw a line that separated the "real" world of allowable insights (e.g the submarine strategy you mention) and the "fanciful" one of invented opportunities I couldn't even come close to doing it. But I'd nonetheless maintain that like love you know it when you feel it - and in France I feel it. Hmmm, I suspect there's something deeply Freudian in that last bit.
By the way, congratulations on your last game report. I've played France a lot and haven't come close to achieving that kind of result.
