If you think it's horrible, then why are you playing this variant?

It's a fun board if you get a workable country like Ghana, Kenya, Russia, India, Quebec, Argentina, etc.

I'm playing it because I wanted to try it, and I gave it two good runs and came to that conclusion.

Pacific Russia isn't that bad, Russia wants to go against Middle-East/Europe and China has to deal with India too, so you can just pick him apart.

I've only played the World variant in gunboat, so press might be different but PacRussia is in my bottom 3 on that board. Russia gets W Siberia every time and China can either take Korea or bounce Japan and Korea so best case you get 1 build and sometimes none unless China is incompetent. Russia usually leaves you alone for a while after taking W Siberia but it is hard to pick apart China since the centers are all adjacent whereas Pac has to move through all those useless neutral spaces in northeast Asia.