Is it fair to say that the Stormlands suffer as a polity due to the fact the Durrandons historically relied too much on hard power (military might) at the expense of statecraft and soft power?

That is one of the things I’ll be looking at in my next essay. Also didn’t help that a lot of their expenditure of hard power was on recapturing the same limited territory. At the end of the day, Massey’s Hook is just not that valuable.