Experimental setup:
I gave myself 24 paratrooper divisions, and deleted most of the Italian army (due to more Italy bullshit you are not allowed to delete 16 of their divisions for no reason, but only 1 was in Italy and not on a victory point).
I gave myself 2000 transports and targeted 24 Italian cities.
Declared war, instantly paradropped into every single Italian VP.
RESULTS:
Italy capitulated on the same day as it was supposed to.
The war did not end like it does for any other nation. Instead the war continued for over 5 days after Italian capitulation. Likely the game trying and failing to force me to take a puppet that can not exist.
Finally the war ended, without forcing me to take a puppet, and I was able to map paint like normal.
This means that you aren't crazy: You can defeat Italy without being forced to take a puppet, but it requires you to get Italy below its surrender limit before Regio del Sud is formed. Further testing will be needed to determine this limit. Now that I have proven it is hypothetically possible to make Italy surrender before it can force a puppet, I will seek out a strategy for doing this in a practical war setting.
What are your thoughts on this alt history scenario?
Naturally it wouldn't be as good of a story if Rocky didn't exist and if Grace had a pilot and an engineer to help him, but did they actually have the resources and ability to solve the Astrophage problem on their own?
Without Rocky's help the Hail Mary would not have had any way to sample Adrian's atmosphere to find Taumoeba. It is possible the only data they would have been able to send back to earth is "we think Astrophage has a natural predator, find a way to engineer an Amoeba that can eat it and live on Venus."
And additionally, they need so many more radiators than the Hail Mary does because they operate at a far higher temperature than we do, so in order to get parts of the spacecraft cold enough for certain functions they need to dump way more waste heat!