I'm kinda liking Rome so far because I like players that play hard like he is. I think he eventually gets voted out before final 3 somewhere but it will be interesting to see who he tries to align with at the merge as he's been pretty strategic up to this point. Some of my favorite Survivor winners and runner ups are players that played hard and were able to work through votes when they had targets on their backs a lot. Tom Westman is probably my all-time favorite winner, other favorites probably are Danni Boatwright, Parvarti Shallow, JT, Cochran, Tony Vlachos (not necessarily the 1st time but he won me over in season 40), Sarah Lacina, Ben Driebergen, and Wendell Holland, and Mike Gabler. I loved watching Russell Hantz play even though a lot of people don't like him he played a good enough game to get to final 3 but pissed too many people off along the way to ever win but there is no denying he knew how to manipulate the votes to get to the end. I kinda hope they bring Russel back for season 50 but wouldn't surprise me if he's not.
That's the one thing I miss about this "new era" of players in Survivor is that too much emphasis in the social aspect so it's hard to read a jury anymore. Players used to respect the physical aspect of winning immunity challenges and how they made moves with key votes and now it just feels like if you didn't make best friends with a majority of the jury those 2 things don't matter much. I mean last season Kenzie essentially won it because the jury thought she had the best "story" outside of the game while Charlie IMO actually played the most well rounded game. Seasons 41 and 42 may have been 2 of the worst season ever after a fantastic season 4 of Winners at War with Erika and Maryanne possibly 2 of the worst winners in the show's history and once again the social crap weighed ever over the other 2 aspects that the runner up's did much better at. Felt like for a few years the show took on some social justice or wokeness phase where stuff outside of the gameplay started to factor into it or Jeff would put it out there for bait hoping to stir the pot a little with certain topics and thankfully they have moved away from that for the most part lately.