More like a head start on the focus.
Empire folk tended to be more into RP early on, and most early Feds either did their own thing or focused on Powerplay - and the mechanics never meant it was worth fussing over BGS back then.
Alliance guys always seemed to have a knack for spreadsheets and focused early on how the BGS interacted with things which meshed together well in the long haul.
Not that it matters, but Is that not just a good definition of what "having their sh*t together" means?
And being "focused on Powerplay", you know the Alliance did rather well at that too, right?
You can say that again. The Alliance controlled 1.17% of populated systems on 1/1/3301. Today, according to eddb.io it stands at 4.03%. That doesn't happen by itself. That's Alliance pilots, as you say, having their sh*t together.
It always puts a smile on my face when I remember those early forum threads that people started, along the lines of: "Hey, I bet we can completely wipe out the Alliance before long!" or "Let's remove the Alliance from the Old Worlds!" It was never possible of course, you can't remove factions from the game, but they could have captured Alliance systems and essentially removed its visibility from the Gal Map. Even back then we had a chuckle reading those posts; we were watching the influence of a good 1000+ Alliance systems at the time (yep, without the automated stuff) and none of them appeared under any organised threat.
It's been a fun few years in Alliance land