1 - 2: Regular summoning also has it's cost; once the summoner is dead, can't summon your stuff. AFAIK there's no way to kill a gnarlmaw, so you can always summon and not lose these points. Whether you think it is the same ''cost'' is up to you, but don't think summoning had it easy in the first place. There's also the unbind possibility, which Nurgle won't have to worry about.
3. You can just do open play and boom, all of those complaints are gone. But in matched play, reinforcement points are needed, unless you want to see something like endless summoning free of charge from tzeentch or Seraphon, vs. armies like Beastclaw or any army that doesn't have access to summonning. How would that be fair?
4. These new summoning rules really are awesome, but they have their advantages/disadvantages just like regular summoning, which makes sense to submit them to the same rules point-wise.
EDIT: About the artefacts, doesn't their text say something like ''when slain, INSTEAD setup the hero...'' Isn't that how they confirmed that it didn't cost points to bring them back? since they're not really dying? Not sure though.
1) I'm not sure what you mean, I never said summoning had it easy. My point is that nurgle summoning doesn't need the reinforcement costs as I consider the limitations currently posed by the contagion points to be enough (unless it turns out you can generate massivly more points than I'm expecting). Also, minor sidenote, gnarlmaws cost 0 reinforcement points, so no points to lose.
3) I never said that endless free summoning would be "fair". Just that reinforcement points are a terrible solution to the problem posed by free endless summoning. It's a bandaid solution and unfortunatly not the only bandaid that came with the GHB.
4) I disagree with the makes sense with. Or at least i disagree with it being a good idea to use this rule specificly, it being a good idea to treat all similar mechanics similarly isn't something I can disagree with
I do think they will change things up a bit for GHB 2018 but that is months away yet. Every change they have implemented with summoning would guide one toward assuming that they aren't happy with the state of summoning currently either.
That being said GHB 2018 isn't here and we would be working off of an assumption of what we think they will change. the reality is that GHB 2017 is the only real guide we have to match play atm and every battletome plays by those rules unless it specifically says it doesn't ( not the case here).
Over looking the rules as written because you think the summoning rules are stupid is fine for house ruling. I for one will always play the game as RAW as I can. When you start getting into personal tastes and opinions the rules can be interpreted and changed dramatically and usually not for the good of the game.
To answer your question about the artifacts, Yes, unless stated otherwise ( which most do now) you pay the costs.
GW rulebooks regularly state to use common sense when in doubt. My common sense would be that adding reinforcement costs to the nurgle summoning would make it borderline unuseable for anything other than spamming gnarlmaws with how slow the contagion points generate. Add to that that it's a major overhaul of the summoning mechanic
and that death gets a similar major summoning overhaul
and that we know they're not happy with the current state of summoning and I can't help but conclude that applying reinforcement points here would be silly.
And yeah, playing RAW tends to be better, but GW does have a tendency of making weird rules that require interpretation regardless, and a tendency to encourage it as well. Which often does tend to make it less of an issue with their games.
Also, that's kind of hilarious in how lame it'd make the artifact... the 2017 GHB does seem to have "broken" quite a lot of mechanics with some of its bandaid rules, you'd think it'd not be that difficult to at least keep the existing mechanics somewhat intact..
