It's a common and disingenuous criticism that registered reports disallow discovery. They don't prevent you from doing exploratory analysis, they simply require you to display it as exploratory rather than pretending that was your hypothesis all along.
Yeah, I have very little respect for this criticism.
In fact, the end of the Slate article gives a perfect example of how things should work. Bem did a large, preregistered psi study, found no effect, but noticed an interesting positive result he hadn't registered for. So he published the negative result, mentioned the positive thread as a site for further research, and is now putting together a preregistered study on that basis.
This seems totally above board. (And again, Bem outperforms the standards of real fields.) There's nothing wrong with noticing something suggestive in a registered dataset, or even gathering exploratory data directly. You just have to confirm what you find with preregistration.
The problem with small changes is they are going to benefit or hurt each party. If you say A || B || C || D then party X will like A & D, and party Y will like B & C but there is no way to move forward.
Just look at giving DC a house seat when it's larger than other states who get not only a seat in the house but 2 in the senate. Well Party A wins, and party B loses so it deadlocks as simply party politics, because they are not trying to follow what people want, just change the system to benefit them.
IMO, the core issue is not the specifics it's a system which has been corrupted over time. Consider there is a North Dakota and South Dakota simply because that gives them more seats in the senate. So, now because of that power grab all those years ago we end up with a small population with more power than they would otherwise have and little reason to give it up.
