there are so many things going on here..not know which to answer first.
1. Being born and brought up in Madurai, I take exception to Kasirajan's post. What is said of madurai is true for every other city in Tamilnadu and I always think Chennai is worse than any place on Earth(I have seen quite a bit of it really!). Thirumalai Nayak's palace is maintained better than many other places. The travesty I feel is the white wash of all those beautiful paintings in the walls around the por tamarai kulam in the temple and I saw that they are trying to re-paint those now-a-days.
2. Interesting to note the things about pandyas. In the brief history of south India, KNS talks about the succession in the pandya lines. It is interesting because they always have a pool of princes rather than one single prince and it keeps them going even when one prince is dead or captured. I think this worked well as long as the purpose is only to foment trouble for the cholas/pallavas but backfired when they rise as a power by themselves. They had too many claimants to the throne and thus all the fratricides et al. It is common today to find many people in the south TN (Tenkasi, Thirunelveli etc) with the family name of Pandian. Probably offshoots of the older lines.
3. KNS right away says that 'Uttama cholan killed AK and sat in the throne' in the abovesaid book. There is no evidence given for this statement implicating Uttama's hand in AK's killing. He does talk about that famous kalvettu about the punishment metted out to AKs killers and wonders why they were let of so easily. My take on this is that there is no conclusive evidence for rrc to tie the killing of AK with Ravidasan and co and so they were let off with a relatively less harsh sentence. Kalki mentions about the lack of information on AKs killing in the kalvettus and all in his pinnurai in PS after conclusion. So while it is a mystery, it is very difficult to blame on uttama or anyone without a direct evidence for the same.
4. As for succession, there is something called 'marumakkal vazhi' in the south TN and Kerala which ensures the passage of the line through the female line (I dont know the relevance of the salic law in this context but ofcourse matrilineal primogeniture was practiced in Ancient Egypt, which again is quite irrelevant in this context anyway!). But any great dynasty has its own succession laws and the most successful ones are when the contest is reduced or when the prize is irrelevant.