You can flip that argument around and point out that RR shouldn't be penalized because SA has been limiting themselves excessively. You've broken the rules just as much as us, the only difference is that we didn't refrain from looting corpses for copies, which
is okay, by word of Piecewise. Hell,
we didn't even break your imagined one-copy rule until Piecewise said we couldn't haul taxidermied bodies around, and there hasn't been even a single gameplay turn since then. The fact that
you didn't taxidermy bodies, despite it being an obviously available tactic OOC, shouldn't penalize
us.
Beyond all that, the relative strength of gangs
shouldn't even matter. This
isn't a PvP game! No gang has ever taken action against another, and while you may have been planning to attack RR, I can say with 100% honesty that I haven't intended to attack anyone else. The only concessions RR has made to the ostensibly-PvP nature of this game have been purely defensive. Yeah, maybe you want to fight and kill our characters, that's totally fine, but arguing about "fairness" is stupid. RR's relative strength only matters because it affects how soon attacking us gets to an acceptable level of risk for
you.
Finally:
Everyone has a "Deck" of words (Though "word" in this instance can refer to a whole phrase such as "Come from caster's hand"). How big that deck can be is determined by your memory stat. Every word in that deck is single use; if you use it, it goes away regardless of the outcome of the spell. To use a word more than once in a spell, you have to use up that many instances of that word. Ie you can’t cast “Fire Fire” if you only have 1 Fire. Using the same word multiple times will increase the power of that word, so "Fire Fire" will be roughly twice as much fire as a single use.
When a gang is formed it gets to choose Five class 1 words, Three class 2 words, Two class 3 words, and One class 4 word. These are their permanent words. Permanent words chosen when a gang is created are always replenished after each encounter. They form the "Starting Deck" for every new gang member. They can choose to use them or not, but they're always available. If a gang member dies, any words they have are immediately offered up to their killer, who can take any words from them they want, up to the killer’s memory limit. The killer can discard words in order to make space for new ones in this case. If killed by accident or circumstance, the words remain with the body and can be looted by anyone.
I don't even see how these statements can be interpreted differently from how we've always played the game. Yeah, it's just unfortunately poor phrasing, but RR has played 100% RAW, and even when we've done things that were ambiguous (looting and taxidermying corpses that were killed for inactivity, for instance), we made sure to get the GM's blessing first. I don't see why we should be penalized because another team (whom we've
never competed with, and don't plan to) didn't play as well. Doubly so when said penalty is only even relevant because that other team wants to fight us!