I would think the solution would be the founder should get a minimum of 1 Persuasion. I mean, what leader doesn't have at least a bare minimum understanding of how to persuade people?
I disagree. If you want your founder to start with Persuasion, select the appropriate answers during character generation to achieve such. If you do not, or if you elect to have the RNG generate a background for you, you must accept the consequences of your decision. Automatically assuming the founder of the LCS must be a capable persuader would be most Arch-Conservative.
Nonsense. They're leading a movement. You can't lead a movement if you aren't at least slightly capable of leading. Otherwise the character would have never stepped up to lead. A persuasion of 1 is not "a capable persuader". A persuasion of 1 is about the level of your average Low-Level Manager. They can manage to convince someone to do something, but not very well and not very effectively, and most people will think they're moronic.
A Persuasion of 3-5 is a capable persuader. And yes, if you want that you should absolutely be picking the Persuasion answers during character generation.
It is entirely possible to create a character that is unsuited to leading a movement at the beginning of the game, but is very suited to other jobs, and I think that makes an interesting choice. The founder gets extremely good stats, a large bucket of starting skills, an automatic +5 or +6 recruit slots, and people will throw themselves in front of bullets for you if you give them the opportunity; you have the potential to lead, you just need to convince people to join you.
The way things should work with the latest code on SVN (not the download in the sticky yet; I've only built on my Mac, not recompiled a new build for Windows), a 0 persuasion character with half-decent Charisma will have a 1-in-3 chance of getting a "low level" character to meet you for recruitment; all bets are off once you get there, but if you fail at that stage, it should be obvious why you're failing to recruit -- plus, you'll gain persuasion at that point.
Regardless, it appears Jonathan has revised the recruiting code with this. Persuading low-quality Liberals ("Low-quality"? How Conservative!) will be possible without Persuasion. On the flip side, you will not command such a domineering persona that Corporate CEOs and Death Squad Officers will join your cause with barely a discussion.
It doesn't seem to function very well, or it only seems to apply to the founder from my experience, because my 14H 0Per hippies can't get anyone to join them until I have them solicit donations for two or three weeks to get 1Per. If it only applies to the founder, that's fine, but as I always have at least 2Per on my found by the choices based on my play style, I am unable to say if it works right for the founder. (Edit: I was testing this on Crack Heads)
Also tying Per to Cha (like he mentioned in one of those posts you linked) does make a whole lot more sense. Is it possible to hybridize them? Because I would think Heart AND Cha should somehow impact it. Well, I know it's possible, the bigger question is "how much of a pain in the ass is it" I suppose.
If you didn't recompile the game from the source code on SVN, the changes aren't in yet, since I'm on vacation and haven't compiled the changes into a release. If you did recompile the game, there are some additional changes I didn't mention -- I changed Persuasion to Charisma instead of Heart in the same SVN commit, and in exchange put Leadership into Heart instead of Charisma (only relevant if you make a Leadership check, which I don't think happens anywhere). So the Hippies could be unable to get anyone to join them in recruitment if they have extremely low Charisma (lower than the founder can possibly start with).
Also, I'd like a (Heart+Charisma)/2 formula for Persuasion; it looks much better than Heart being the sole attribute modifier for it.
Given that it is currently heart/2, (heart+cha)/2 could easily be obscene. I would go with (H+Cha)/3 to level it out a bit more.
To clarify on the dividing by two, the bonus to your skill from stats is the stat divided by two, up to a maximum of three more than the skill value; the cap on the skill is still your stat value.
It used to be more possible to make skills use combinations of stats, and there were formerly lots of skills that used multiple stats. Religion, for example, was 50-50 Heart and Wisdom. But eventually I nailed everything into one stat, since that's a marginal improvement with the high cost of making it even harder to figure out how the game works without a guide. It would now be pretty difficult to make hybrid skills, but I think we can get away with just tying Persuasion to Charisma -- though I obviously sympathize with the idea of making it tied to Heart, since I must have thought it was a good idea to put it there at some point.