I am not a developer (anymore)? That is the point.
Oh, then I got the wrong impression, my apologies!
Also that was not a shitpost, but a genuine suggestion. What are the problems with it that make you think it was shitposting?
It was the adding a random number thing combined with "guarantueed to not have bad side effects". Making lobby rating always white is a good suggestion and already on the way to being implemented. I believe it is planned to be included in the next faf patch. But I don't understand what adding a random number is supposed to accomplish?
No he would not start with his ladder rating! Because you can have the same displayed rating while having entirely different mean and deviation! Trueskill rating cannot be expressed in a single number if you want to actually manipulate it in a way that makes sense to Trueskill!
Yes that was a bit of an oversimplification by me. Only if he only played ladder and nothing else his global rating would be exactly the same in mean and dev to his ladder rating. However, even if he also played other games, a settled deviation is somewhere between 60 and 80, so I am pretty confident that if he played enough games in the matchmakers to have established rating there, his global would also have a similar deviation and in consequence a similar mean.
The rules operate on displayed rating, because that is what the client shows to the players and we would accidentaly exclude new players from the adjustments, because their mean is massively higher than their displayed rating in comparison to established players.
I don't really understand why you think it is so much worse to have these rules use displayed rating instead of mean.