That's perfect, I will use that term from now on whenever somebody proposes any kind of automation and will see how often somebody will try to correct me.
Carcassonne is also really nice with children. You can start them on just the "puzzle" aspect on attaching matching tiles, without scoring.
Our oldest child is now capable of the base game, and I can still make it interesting for me by going for secondary objectives, such as filling difficult gaps ;-)
In particular, the core disagreement seems to be about whether the automorphisms of C should keep R (as a subset) fixed, or not.
The easy solution here would be to just have two different names: (general) automorphisms (of which there might be many) and automorphisms-that-keep-R-fixed (of which there are just the two mentioned.
If you make this distinction, then the approach of construction of C should not matter, as they are all equivalent?
To add to the above: The high-performance commercial solvers typically offer a free (as in beer) licence for academics (students and researchers), so this subgroup has a smaller incentive to develop a competing solver.
Similarly, researches who do spend their time implementing solver algorithms and running tedious computational experiements (the work that the software vendors put in) have historically had difficulties getting academic credit for their work, because the journals favored theoretical work.
That being said, with HiGHS and SCIP, we have two open-source solvers developed in an academic setting, with a lot their graduates joining commercial software vendors. So it's not like these are two completely separate worlds.
I later looked up the resources on Wikipedia which also listed Canada as having significant mining capacity. So maybe that argument is not strong either.