Fair enough! I'm intrigued to know your opinion of the game from what you've played of it. Do you enjoy the synchronization/counting aspect?
So I'm certainly not going to tell people that they should play by the rules as written. There's no game there. But perhaps this explains why the author of the original game perceived it as being polarizing. (But the problem is that the moment you transform this to a game about communicating over a limited channel, or to a game about reading tells, there are better options around.)