[Evilhomer]

It is not so much of a stretch really. I was thinking about making a post about the green dragon myself underlining why it is a fantastic choice for early game in competitive MP games. Here are some reasons:

The thing with the green dragon is really the dom2 it starts with. If you use a green dragon with nature-4 and dom9 (it really needs awe to being able to expand safely on turn 1), you get +80 points left when you start fiddling with your scales. The same setup with red/blue only gives you +24 points. That means you can take 2 better scales with the green dragon for "free".

The ability to fairly safely expand on turn 1 is huge, since you get a very strong second turn with more gold and more resources as well, which will mean a very strong expansion rate/new forts etc. you should however pick a forest to avoid running into knights just to be on the safe side. You can actually use slightly lower production scale since you will have access to bonus production from a neighbouring forest (which you would not normaly have).
(I ran 30+ test with this and even with indy-7 he never got killed expanding blindly, and the area 10 bile is great and synergies well with the fear/awe).

On top of this nature-4 (he will have nature 4 in human form, 2 in dragon) gives you access (using some forging) to high level nature and those early great globals like gift of health, mother oak, enchanted forest.

And as icing on the cake once he gets personal regen he gets very hard to kill, the ice/fire drake has nothing as good in early mid game.

It is true about the bless that fire and water are better however (though nature can be very useful on giants).

So as an awake SC for early expansion I have not found a better choice that is available to most nations.

The way to use green dragon in my opinion to take indies (for those that have problem using dragons) is to put him all the way to the back (like a corner) and script him to hold hold fire(closest). This will result in him using the bile when he can and attacking normaly once the indies close in on him.

Just my 2 cents.