I agree with the first part Rockman. I see no real difference. Proponents of the DR will argue that the difference is the impending retal if you GS after making a grab rather than DRing yourself as a deterrent (you aren't actually owed any acres...you just have to find them elsewhere).

And you are right that instances like the one you mentioned regarding all-explore landgrabs happen on this server. However, I can say that I almost always grab larger-land countries around my networth - thats a smart grab in my opinion (depending on military tech of course.) I don't purposely keep myself small to hit those countries. Its not like I scour the scores list, find your countries and wait days and days for you to grow bigger so I can piss you off while grabbing. The fact remains that you will often get better net gains grabbing those similar-networth, high-land countries instead of spending all of your turns exploring those acres at a certain point.

I think the alliance and primary servers tend to rot peoples brain when it comes to landgrabbing. Not all landgrabs are an act of war or a personal attack on you or your clan specifically. Maybe you just have a tasty looking country...

The only time I do it to be a fluff is when I know that a particular alliance uses DR as a deterrent. I will catch a country right at the end of his DR, sitting on a huge chunk of land with nothing but spies. I'll get nice gains, always net because of ghost acres after the attack and get the satisfaction of hitting a player that goes out of his way to abuse the system to keep his acres on no military -> which is rare since my alliance stays in war.