yeah, it irks me a bit

This kind of spaghetti is normal and fairly unavoidable in Nomic, where a new game concept is introduced and then factored into previous mechanics; check almost any past ruleset and you’ll find examples. Although we could stop periodically to rewrite the whole ruleset so that it reads clearly from top to bottom, it’s difficult to do that with the proposal queue always moving forward. It’s perhaps not worth the effort of making the game neatly legible to new players, when it’s mostly just being played by its designers.

(Ironically your own next proposal will have no effect if this passes, because it refers to Rule 2.1 when it means the Goods rule.)