I'm pretty confident that with regards to leadership figures "hardcoded" into the NC backstory, no one ever messed with Crahn.
To this day I suffer from severe whiplash injury (explains some things I guess) from shaking my head over the decision to take out major pillars of the NC backstory (Lioon Reza, Hagen Yager … well defined and well designed characters) and replace them with shallow, glorified Faction Counsellors … also without properly making the transition in the gameworld (because holy surprise batman … turns out the original backstory was nicely/deeply integrated in the gameworld, making such a change a huge undertaking).
I would have had my doubts if a witty writer like Callash (undoubtly the best author we ever had) could've managed the transition. I had little doubts that the team at that time would fuck it up … and fuck it up they did. Not having the developer support to back up the massive storyline changes in the gameworld surely didn't help, but that wasn't news either - so why go ahead with that crazy idea, I don't know.
</rant>
anyone got a fish?