I think that question is better for more thorough analysis but less good as an intuition pump.

I'm now trying to figure out whether I find the does-the-alternate-human-society-have-it more tractable as a way of thinking about it, or whether I'm simply attached to it. The question "there's another society of humans over there: do they have [x]?" certainly seems a lot easier to me than "what needs to have happened for this counterfactual to be true?"