Being able to join the game and see your initial position and chat with players before the game starts is a bad idea.
Because the optimal strategy is to join and leave a game to get information of other starting positions and optimize your own starting position.
It also gives a strategic advantage to people that join early versus those that join last.
You can already see a tendency of people not wanting to be the last to join, or leaving and joining games over and over.
I think that will only get worse as players get more experienced.

I suggest that people join a game but can't talk between each other or see their starting positions until every player has joined. Then they have the four hour period before the game starts to actually start diplomatic talks and strategizing.

VEry good points.

I'm wondering if there are any reasons to why it's setup the way it's currently is?

I agree that it can be a little difficult for the last player to join the game. I have also seen players join and leave games for to get some other position.
I do not see any harm in not allowing them to see the map or chat early on for normally I do not wait long in a game before it starts now that there are more players in the beta.
But also I do not really see the need to change it since I myself never check much before the game starts. And I do not notice much chatting.
This seems to be a problem of unrated games rather than rated?

EDIT: it might have been implemented to overcome long waiting in early game stages when not so much players where there to join...?! ^^

I don't know why they did, but definitely Lobby-based games have the big problem of requiring people to sit on a "waiting for players" screen, which (specially in PC games) results in people leaving before the needed players join. You need to have a pretty big playerbase to keep those lobbies filling up fast, it's a scary multiplayer pattern for game developers. (if you're interested in that sort of thing, Daniel Cook wrote a really nice piece on multiplayer logistics http://www.lostgarden.com/2013/12/multi ... stics.html )

I guess that getting into the game, planning moves and talking strategy immediately makes that it a lot more enjoyable for first-time players, instead of staring at a "waiting for players" screen (potentially for hours). But it has the unfortunate side-effects I mentioned above

Part of this is the fact users are at liberty to create games. We have so many games waiting to start, it dilutes the playerbase amongst them and prolongs waiting times.

Maybe it would be good to automate a list of games, say ten- eg. 4 unrated, then another 6 with different minimum ratings. As soon as one is full and starts, it disappears and a new empty game is generated.

Then, a limit of player created public games for the custom games