Regarding Tournament SSR 3: One of the intentions behind this is to speed up play. Everybody can count dots, but if there suddenly is a strange icon, flag, or other kind of stuff you have to pause and understand what it means. At least two other tournaments (Scandinavian Open in Copenhagen and Supporting Fire in Borås) have the same SSR and I think it's perfectly reasonable.
The other reason is that Precision Dice is guaranteed to have 100% weight on all sides. That is a good thing.
The issue I have with the rule is this: who has done the extensive testing to determine that such-and-such dice
are acceptable and so-and-so dice
are not acceptable?
If the answer is (as I strongly suspect) "no-one has been stupid enough to waste the incredible amount of time required to do that sort of testing" then who the hell thinks they are qualified to make it a rule in the first place?
The corollary question is "who has observed that so-and-so dice are obviously unfair and should not be allowed"? Again, the answer is going to be "no-one" because that would require the observation of the same pair of dice over many, many hundreds of games. A pair of dice that rolls snake-eyes three times in a row is not unbalanced, it's an event well within the limits of normal random chance. If they roll snake-eyes 500 times out of a thousand, well then you've got something to be concerned about -- if it ever happened! (Hint: it's never happened.)
[EXC: when playing Jamie Westlake, because he has sold his soul to Satan]
A rule that prohibits something that is never going to happen and can't be proved in any reasonable manner
is a bad rule. I don't care how many tournaments use the rule,
it's a bad rule.
Now, if the prohibition is
actually about strange symbols on the dice -- then (i) it's a completely different argument and should be presented as that, not as a probability/fairness issue! And (ii), surely it's a matter of taste? I don't
personally use the BattleSchool dice, but I know lots of people who do, and the percentage by which it has "slowed down the game" could be measured in micro-seconds. I normally use Schwerpunkt dice, which replace the "1" with the Schwerpunkt logo, and which has not been observed to slow down my games by any measurable period of time. Again -- a rule prohibiting something that doesn't happen anyway is not worth the effort of typing up.
The rules that I, personally, am actually rather bothered by are the SSR. Most of them smell strongly of grudge rules -- "I don't think that rule is fair/realistic/I lost a scenario because of that once so the rule must be CHANGED and when I am in charge of everything I will CHANGE IT because I have the power to do that!!!" Grudge rules are the worst kind of house rules, they are lazy and stupid and have no place in a tournament.