I disagree with the idea that its just as easy to cheat when countries are jot known. Especially on large maps.
Let's use then new wwiv map as an example. Say 3 buddies want to cheat. they decide to pick Indonesia, south Africa, and Oceania. Quite easily they crush Australia, and then boom, they own then south east end of the board. An easy defensible positikn, and in reality, nothing looks that amiss since I'm sure that's happened before. Now, let's see them replicate that if they pulled central states, Oceania, and Russia. Random countries, especially on large maps, can definitely cut down on potential cheating since the cheaters might not be physically able to help each other due to the large map.
As for this statement by Retillion:
"Obviously, if they are immediate neighbours, they would enjoy great security in the early game. But of course, it could even be stronger to choose countries which are two, or even three, countries away so that they could easily target the same enemies and control a larger area in the middle game. Finally, it could also be very effective that the two players choose two countries that are as far away as possible so that the gains of their alliance will be maximum in the endgame."
Quite frankly, if someone is resorting to cheating, they almost always suck at diplomacy. The only way they're successful is cheating. so picking countries far apart would just end up in them dying. No, they'd pick countries very close like Australia/Oceania or countries only one spot removed like Indonesia/Oceania, otherwise they couldn't stand on their own. Making it easy for them to pick adjacent countries and actually be able to effectively cheat is silly.
I call again for the empowerment of some of then well known people on here. Let those people have then power to assign countries when asked for SRGs and tournaments. To leave as is is asking for people to take advantage of it. How would everyone who's advocating for then status quo feel if theoretically someone arranged via private email to meta game with a few others in a world game and ran the table because of it? You'd be unable to prove it, and we could do it REAL easy with then setting of picking your own country. We could dominate a hemisphere within years and no one would have any idea we're cheating at least with random selection, we wouldn't be able to set up a perfect storm of conditions to do so so easily.