It's an age old problem.
A lot of people complaining about the lack of plausibility in the focus trees don't really offer real alternatives. Usually we see things floated like "What if the British were defeated at Dunkirk?" or "What if Operation X succeeded?" This kind of thing doesn't really need any kind of scripted representation at all. The effect of those things happening is already represented through the destruction of assets, etc.
I think there is a real criticism to be made that a lot of the countries don't have focus trees that really reflect the complexity of their situation in 1936, notably the United States which has an extremely lackluster set of focuses for historical and semi-historical routes. I think this can also be said of Japan, and perhaps Germany. While Germany's focus tree is "good" in the sense that it works, it doesn't really offer a range of choices for more plausible alternatives, or at least not as much as it could.
Some of the newer focus trees have improved in this regard, like Portugal where the Salazar dictatorship can choose to join the Axis or the Allies. We also seem to see this with the newly revealed focus trees for the upcoming DLCs.
For Germany I think there were a lot of missed opportunities. There are some good ideas in the abstract, like the ability to angle for an alliance with Poland although it is poorly represented. There really is no modelling of the circumstances in which the Poles might feel that it's an acceptable offer or the ramifications this has in Germany itself. It feels like a missed opportunity that Paradox did not incorporate the tension between the Nazi political leadership and the military leadership. It could have been interesting if the balance of power was modeled in which asserting the Nazi Party's supremacy over the military had real ramifications towards military preparedness and competency, but gave you more diplomatic freedom in being aggressive and taking risky moves, or you could choose to respect the military's position and avoid the issues that arose with Hitler's meddling in purely military matters but at the cost of being more constrained diplomatically. It could have lead to different ways of the war beginning and unfolding.
That's just an example. I don't even think the above is truly plausible, but it's more plausible than a monarchist civil war or some of the other things we see in the game. Then again, if we were focused purely on historical plausibility in most cases there actually would be no room for choice in the first place. Things usually happened the way they did for a reason and in most cases things could not have happened another way. There are exceptions, but not many. I think this thread and many like it tend to become derailed by discussions of history that are at best tangential to the game. I can understand that; most of us around here really enjoy reading about and discussing history
I don't really have a problem with sillier ahistorical stuff as long as it's optional and doesn't come at the epxense of the more historical and semi-historical options. In some cases as with the US and Japan we see that the fantasy stuff came directly at the expense of historical content, while with others like Germany this was less the case.
It will be interesting to see what they do with the Soviet Union. I have to admit I'm worried it will turn out like the French rework with everything under the sun being represented but very little of it being fleshed out in any meaningful way.
Focus trees and alternative history stuff seems to work best when the design philosophy incorporates some restraints and a paradigm to build content around. When a focus tree tries to be all things to all people, it usually ends up feeling unfocused, generic, and not particularly fun. Again, I think that's partly what made the German rework's alternate history content so good: they designed the content around the constraint that Germany must always be hostile to the Soviet Union. In contrast, the US seems to offer fascist and communist options for no reason other than for it to be there, and it feels uninspired and boring as a result. Ditto with Japan's communist and democratic content.
