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I agree with that recommendation of picking the lower cost card if your are deciding between two, but that only makes sense once you've settled into a guild. Otherwise you're just falling into whichever guild happens to have the best low cost card in the pack with no consideration to which color has the strongest cards overall. Lower cost cards make better picks because you need more of them to fill out your curve than higher cost ones, but the power level of a card is a separate consideration. Another factor to consider is that Orzhov has the tools to both reach and win the long-game which makes a 6 CMC Orzhov card less cost prohibitive than a 6 CMC card in any other guild. I recently played an Orzhov deck with 3 6 CMC cards (2 Urbis Protector s and 1 Merciless Eviction ) and I didn't have trouble getting to 6 mana at all. Neither did any of my opponents, one of whom had the Treasury Thrull in question.

Ironically in some sets the opposite was true. In AVR for example, G/U was so powerful that it was winning 73% of its matches so you were often better off just drafting it from the start, regardless of what cards happened to be in your particular packs. If people had drafted back when the original Alpha set was released I imagine you would have seen similar statistics for drafting blue over green. Anyone who played the original set would have remembered how ridiculously overpowered blue was and how worthless green was.

For this set however, I think keeping an open mind and drafting what's open is a good idea. Except that on the first pick you have no information with which to ascertain that. Therefore when faced with two cards that are roughly equal in terms of overall power level, you have to go with the one that you know is going to lead you to a guild with a strong track record. If you take the Thrull now you have a six drop you are guarenteed to play in Orzhov, that could be worth splashing into Boros or Dimir depending on the circumstances. The white/black commons and uncommons have a lot of standouts. Everything with extort is solid, you have the most removal out of any other guild. Currently there is 16% more competition for Orzhov than there is for Gruul, and yet the people playing Orzhov are winning 44% more often. You don't get those kind of numbers unless there is a serious difference in average card strength between RG and WB. Regardless of the average strength of cards in pack 1 you already know how the draft is going to work out, the people drafting W and B are going to have access to better cards [on average] than the people drafting RG. If a lot of people were to all draft WB that advantage would erode, but the statistics do not support that. Currently RG is drafted slightly less often than WB yet does significantly worse and neither are overdrafted.

I find the stats quite interesting.

Also, just want to chime in, I've never had trouble hitting 6 mana as Orzhov. If you can't last that long, you are pretty much pooched. 

It's interesting that you would bring up the 'advanced stats' because sabermetrics was a revolution that let a small market team be competetive with one of the lowest salaries in baseball. It subsequently let a large-market team (the Boston Red-Sox) win the World Series. Understanding the statistics that let you see the true value for a player is immensely helpful, and all of the teams that stuck with the old methods got left behind.

The problem with Gruul as a Guild is that with the exception of the Ghor-Clan Rampager, none of the common or uncommon Bloodrushers are efficent creatures. Relying on Bloodrush is just asking to be blown out by instant speed removal, common stuff like Grisly Spectacle, Pit Fight and Smite, and if you aren't discarding the creatures for bloodrush you are playing creatures that cost more than they should. I've played both with and against Gruul and it has by far the lowest winning percentage of any other guild and I was able to get a Gruul deck with 2 Clan Defiances, Homing Lightning, Ground Assault, Arrows of Justice and Massive Raid. If you play Gruul you are inevitably going to have to come up with a way to make cards like Scab-Clan Charger and Slaughterhorn work, and in my experience they don't. Not when you're running up against Grisly Spectacles, Smites, Orzhov Charms and the like.

Orzhov simply has a better suite of cards and there's no getting around that.