Your second assumption is right; I try to keep the author appeal of my stories to a minimum so I don't end up like all those cringy SCPs that were clearly just written for memes of fetish fuel (or lately, to express an immature political view). However, I'm a big fan of Mechas and Kaijus and I think my works have hinted towards that side of naval warfare plenty. (Why would we want cool Depth Charges from Shifty? And steal Kaijus from the GOC with the R.I.P.? Heck, Abdera'ad is a basically just a Kaiju.) Also, I can't believe people fall for the "the Red Fleet belongs to Pepsi" story when this was clearly just a cover for us absorbing old GRU-P resources.
Well, the term "ruin" seems to imply rumbling in my opinion, but we all have bad choices of words some days.
"Permanent trespassing" seems like an oxymoron, unless you mean squatting. And just acquiring the estate through legal means, slowly (de)gentrifying the neighbourhood to bully people away seems indeed like an better option. In the end, your front company might become an actual establishment in its own right — when somebody asks you what you're doing, pointing at all the licit goods you're manufacturing and selling seems like the best cover there is. Unless they dig deep into your bookkeeping, they wouldn't know how 0.15% of your throughput is diverted to nefarious means.
But at that point, it would be easier to just infiltrate an already existing establishment, instead of an derelict one. (There are some left-over cloth widths of the camo-pattern because of dumb government budget cuts? Oh my, oh my, I know somebody who knows somebody who can make you turn them to a profit.)
Actually, I'm kind of disappointed Cad locked the "CI Conspiracies" thread.
I see the Insurgency as ruthless, but not suicidally stupid. In fact, i try to portray them as as genre-savvy as possible. (Did I ever used as many "as" as I did just now?)
Being fail-deadly is an objective in its own right, but the heroes have a vexing tendency to use that against guilty, devil-abiding villains. Or, to quote point 9 on the Evil Overlord List:
I will not include a self-destruct mechanism unless absolutely necessary. If it is necessary, it will not be a large red button labelled "Danger: Do Not Push". The big red button marked "Do Not Push" will instead trigger a spray of bullets on anyone stupid enough to disregard it. Similarly, the ON/OFF switch will not clearly be labelled as such.
If you have something that powerful, go around and use it for extortion (e.g. look at North Korea… and I'm not exclusively referring to Cad's headcanon on them). If Pokémon has taught me anything, that that suicide pacts are offensive weapons, not defensive ones.
Having a dead hand requires your opponent to know about them, and given what the Foundation habitually manages to contain, I'm not sure our remote Agents pose any credible threat. If they did, we'd already won.
Oh, you should absolutely store your stuff wherever possible and convenient. Just make it look like the secret weapon cache isn't yours. In the best case, you get who ever discovers it to go after your scapegoat, or if they're big and disorganized enough, they just accept it's they own stuff. (I.e. if the GOC has 108 members, that means 107 of them will probably accept they just happened to find an disused Illuminati safehouse and move on.)
Establishments renting/leasing out storage space make for a great infiltration targets, by the way. You get to call dibs on anything interesting before the Storage Wars/Storage Hunters/Auction Hunters (there are too many reality TV shows with this premise) crew shows up, you get plausible deniability and have place to hold stuff temporarily. That's probably what facility designation like "Closet" or "Cardboard" are all about.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. (I prefer the german equivalent proverb, but I can see why it isn't used in english…) Your living assets already have valuable skillets, experience working in the Insurgency, are already registered for record-keeping purposes (both official and unofficial), have cover stories and fake identities attached to them, etc. A zombie force can only get you so far.
