wardog300k: FS2 retail does not have strict error checking like FS2 Open does. A lot of errors go past retail FS2 error checks and with a bit of "luck". you don't necessarily notice anything wrong. This does not mean you don't have errors, retail FS2 simply doesn't react appropriately to them.
FS2 Open on the other hand has much, much stricter error checking, courtesy of great many SCP developers who are modders themselves. However, FS2 Open release builds may have strange problems, crashes, and does not tell you what is wrong. The release builds do not have strict error checking enabled, because they incur heavy performance penalty, for this purpose you should use debug builds.
Debug builds are bread and butter of all modders, and because of them quality of mods have steadily increased over the years. The days when modders released mods that had numerous errors, crashes and other strange issues are mostly behind us.
All that said, FS2 Open is not infallible and it has taken great many years to get even to this point, but FS2 Open keeps improving. Some problems people encounter are actual bugs in FS2 Open itself, and not in the mod. People tend to push FS2 Open and by doing so, we discover new problems we need to address.
If you want to know what is wrong with your mod when you use FS2 Open, please help us to help you. You can do this by providing us with a
debug log.
