Murder By The Book - Ender's Game

Oh boy ok I can feel my blood rising a bit. I'm gonna do my best to counterargue you rationally, but anyone's free to tell me to take time out if I step over a line.

While inactivity does indeed stifle discussion, killing inactive players gets us little or no information

The only information you lose lynching an inactive player versus an active player is the lynch target's interactions. You still get a wagon. You still get other players' opinions of them. Threatening a lurker with a lynch usually yields discussion which gains you the missing factor anyway.

where as successfully lynching a mafia member gets us a lot closer to winning the game.

Lynching scum and lynching lurkers is not mutually exclusive? This makes the very faulty assumption that mislynches of active players does happen? A lot????

Also, it seems to me that more players are likely to participate towards the midgame where there is more information to work off of[...] or too wary to post right away but are far more open later in the game.

This isn't a thing that happens, unless by some godawful RNG antics all of the inactive players happen to be the town power roles. Lurky town is liable to stay lurky town all game, unless drawn out with the threat of a lynch. Lurky scum will come out of their shell once nobody's around who gives enough of a crap to force lynches.

By the same merit we might leave in players that are truly absent and would be a lot more obvious later on.

These players need to be removed from the game, and we're hard up for replacements. They make it an unfun slog for the active players, and don't deserve whatever team victory they might get.

I say we target active now, and shoot for your lynch inactivity strategy after we reveal one or two people's alignments.

But the mafia will do that for us by the start of D3??????

The game is supposed to be fun the whole way through, it's not about slogging through a grind of inactive lynches....

This is all very valid, but still ignores the fact that Lurkers do not stop lurking without pressure. It is. Not a thing that happens, especially so in a setup where we've been told there are lots of vanillas. Lurkers need some kind of personal motivation to have any investment in the game, and learning to look at how players other than you interact can come later. For your average joe townie the lynch vote is all they have to coerce lurkers.

The mob will have to start stringing up lurkers sooner or later, and for some lurkertypes I imagine Deadchat would be more fun because they can passively watch the game play out (which was what they were basically doing anyway) and puzzle the setup out without any pressure. It is so shitty to watch two/three active players (at least one of whom is scum) try to make lynches happen on lurkers come D4/5/6/etc.

You also seem to not acknowledge that two active town players can end up arguing each other into the ground, thinking the other is scum. So you can't ignore lurkers to only examine the interactions between the active players only, because scum will feature in both of those groups and to suggest otherwise is disingenuous.