Read this thread with interest, I tend to agree that players have a tendency to want confirmation prior to raising support tickets, out of consideration for those who have to trawl through the bug reports. No one wants to submit a ticket for something that doesn't exist. To process-minded people, it's not efficient and delays the efforts to correct actual issues (time/resource management). That's why players want confirmation of their findings or better guidance.
FD appear happy that we throw data at them if there is any suspicion on our part that a game function is faulty. While I can understand that this isn't efficient (it is going to produce wild goose chases), if that is how FD wish to proceed to protect the integrity of ED's inner workings, players will just have to oblige them.
I would expect dissatisfaction from the player base though if this proves to be an extensive process without resolution, you can't have your cake and eat it too.
I suspect this is the kind of question that won't be answered because it is a black box. My theory is that "civil war" is bad as it splits the faction - civil war means troubles from within, not with the other factions.
This is a case in point of obfuscation within the game system.
I think civil war is a tipping point scenario if certain conditions are met. Once you have 2 (or more I suppose) factions within a system that are a) dominant (high influence relative to other system factions), b) in balance (equal/near equal influence) and (possibly) c) one or more of the factions are adversarial (feudal, dictatorship for example), a civil war is triggered. Events during that conflict determine further influence gains and once one faction has established a certain margin of influence over the others the civil war state ends - with one faction dominant.
You don't always see it occur prior to expansion, as if the dominant faction reaches expansion point unchallenged, there's no need for an ED "Civil War".
I think civil war for star systems in ED is internal in the sense that it's an intra-system conflict, not an intra-faction conflict. It's a little misleading as Rearden is quite correct in the normal sense - it's self against self, but the term serves providing you know the parameters that the term is used for in ED - which isn't really clear.