fazer: the answer is yes.

i received no FA last reset and finished t10. tagged of course. and i'm obviously not the only example. there's countless of such examples from many alliances (evo/laf included, as well as many other ppl such as sof/sol even, omega puts up t10s, sanct has a guy (ley i believe) who puts up unaided t10s etc. etc.). despite what the flaming is leading you to believe, it's actually a pretty common occurrance to have non FA-ed tagged t10 now. hell bakku won last reset with no FA with a record breaking NW. i dont think t10 without FA is that hard these days. i didn't play in the first few resets of EE and came back recently, and last reset was the first time i tried netgaining somewhat (so it was the only one i can talk about since i was following the countries and their stocks) and from what i remember 9 of the 10 top 10s didn't do what we term "unlegit" (aka FA/market buyout/land from own alliance).. so i thought it was a pretty good reset in terms of "t10 without FA". not saying it's easy either.. it does require some luck as well as skills and a lot of time ;P

you can easily scan whether a person got FA or not. it's not rocket science to figure out how much production someone can have and do some math to figure out their nw. especially for non demos because reselling is out of the question.. even with demo you can easily figure out how much networth they can make from reselling from the market charts and the market transactions (but that part is more time consuming). it's not really a mystery anymore these days... that's one reason (i'm hoping at least) why people are FAing for t10s less often. because it's too easy to figure out you are getting a nw that's not possible based on how you played your country...

for instance this reset's t10 lineup shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. we all know (and evo knows) who has been a t10 country all reset and who hasn't... so anyone trying to FA massively into it is just going to be so fluffing obvious...

i dont think untagged is possible though unless you are counting "untag yourself last minute". and no one is stupid enough to do that anyways just for the sake of being the first untagged t10.

speaking of techers and finishes, i personally have 3 alliance rank 1s as a techer (none in the EE era though).

i think more often than not, techers are usually on top... but of course if there's too many techers (like this reset) then tech prices would tank and casher/farmers will win.