Gonna guess this guy knows more about it than me...lol. But ya, I don't think the goal with special tribes is to make them "better" than other tribes. In fact, just the opposite. Seems to me Midjiwan tries extremely hard to keep all the tribes as competitive as possible. But they also want them all to have their own unique mechanics and playstyle.
I can tell you that creativity > competitiveness, but yes. We at least try to make things balanced, but of course, that's not always easy.
In short, the team likes to just *make things*, and we find out the issues later. :P