"And that challenge happened on day 5 or 6, not episode 1!!!"

So what??? I never stated that the season started with THAT challenge. All I said was the game of Survivor starts on Day One.

"I completely, fully, 200% agree. Then the Casaya "older" women would have lost a second time. Melinda would have left. Ruth would have picked Dan while Bruce went to Casaya anyway.
The game would have started with 7 on each side, 4 men and 3 women. Where did I read that before?!!

WOOOW!!!!! There's a chuck full of ASSumptions here.
Thanks to the Anti-Darwin scheme victimizing Tina that was orchestrated by pathethic and inept Melinda and Cirie, I would tend to agree with your first assumption that the older women would have probably lost another challenge...although we don't know that for sure. Even so you can't further ASSume that Melinda would have been voted out. As we saw in the last episode, HOW a tribe loses a challenge could dictate greatly who gets voted out. And all these set of circumstances (which are unknown) could have affected the inevitable pick 'em. So what was "read before" might not be relevant to what might actually have occurred.