It's an interesting dynamic he has with his son. The player thinks Kratos would make a terrible dad, and Kratos would agree. He was very deliberately not a father to his son, until his wife died. He may be the ghost of Sparta, but he would still rather not throw his son to the wolves, so they both have to grow.
And, you know, carve a bloody path through the Norse Pantheon, too, because they won't leave him and his kid alone.
Indeed, but you still have to walk with them, and can only have a certain number of eggs at a time anyway: an aggressively low 9. The gambling section of the brain can't really get tickled, unless someone enjoys marathons.
Eggs tick a lot of boxes for being lootboxes, but they miss the (in my opinion) largest factor to match: you can't buy them. If you can't buy the lootbox, you can't just tickle that gambling center of the brain to the business's benefit. Now, you can buy incubators, which are needed to hatch multiple eggs, but the 'best' eggs still need the most distance walked to hatch. I won't call their monetization completely scum-free, nor will I defend actual loot boxes, or especially Kotaku, but I think they fall short of being loot boxes.
My biggest problem with the idea of him being controlled opposition is that they didn't need controlled opposition. They were going to have Hillary. They were convinced they had won... until the votes came in. Similarly, if he were controlled opposition, they wouldn't have had to blatantly cheat to get Biden in.
to answer the thread title as someone who knows very little about Russia: I get the feeling the govt at large largly ignores the populace, for good or for ill. Political intrigue is in the govt, and the normal person doesn't care because it really doesn't effect them. But the down side is that the country is like a colder wild west, but with track suits and vans, rather than cowboy boots and horses.