Okay, I guess I should wade into this mess and sort out what happened and where we go next.
What happened in the pastThe main issue here was that when released TBP 3.4b had a significant number of bugs. The majority of them didn't affect the players (more often they were problems that caused issues for FREDders) but they would cause the occasional crash. At this point the majority of the TBP had left / burned out and had no interest in continuing to support the mod. As far as IP Andrews was concerned the game was complete. It worked (mostly) and it had been thoroughly bug tested. The remaining errors were beyond the abilities of the team to fix. So the team called 3.4b "final" and quit. The idea was that TBP 3.4b would be final and now it was up to fans to make missions and campaigns for it. In addition there was a big push at the time to get TBP multiplayer up and running and this was exposing a lot of issues cause multiplayer was badly broken (far worse than it is now).
Since TBP was finalised any new release might break existing content. With no TBP team to fix those issue, it would basically lead to TBP becoming more and more unplayable (That's the same sort of issue that made the SCP insist that FS2_Open can always run retail).
The big problem was that bugs from TBP would end up in Mantis and the SCP were expected to fix them. Unfortunately the second you run TBP (even on 3.6.9) you'll get a ton of warnings often about things that were easily fixable. That makes it very difficult for any coder to actually fix bugs because there was a good possibility that the bug wasn't in the code at all, and was simply bad data. This eventually lead to a big argument between the SCP and the TBP team. The SCP wanted a new release of TBP with all the warnings fixed so that they could continue to support it. The remaining members of TBP didn't want to update TBP and then have to beta test the entire game again to be certain nothing had broken (either from the fixes to the data, or from moving to 3.6.10).
As someone who is a member of both teams, I remember being thoroughly disgusted by the actions of some members on both sides of the argument. It definitely wasn't just IP Andrews being unreasonable.
Eventually IP Andrews refused to allow anyone to release a new version of TBP (Which to this day has been respected) and then refused to allow anyone to make a mod which fixed the errors (Which no one else agreed with). When the other members of TBP and the community disagreed with him on the latter point, IP Andrews demanded that we remove TBP from HLP (which we promptly ignored) and started calling everyone thieves for not doing it.
So that gets us to the point we're at now. TBP still stands at 3.4b and requires the Zathras mod to work properly with any build from this decade
What happens nowWhile I understand the decision to freeze TBP at 3.4b and only allow mods to upgrade the game it should be remembered that the decision to do that was taken in 2007. The question is, "Is it sensible to install the game for new users on 3.6.9 or should we upgrade the default install to something more modern?" And to be frank, I really can't see any good reason to stick with 3.6.9. I don't think anyone is using it. Those who are, are having a worse time than they would on a more modern build.
What I intend to do is to unpack Zathras and use it to upgrade 3.4b. Along the way I'll probably need some help to fix any errors that still exist. Then I'll package everything up and we can release the whole thing as TBP 3.5. If there is interest in continuing development of TBP after that, I'd be very happy to help with that too.
People on here are still bad mouthing me, TBP and by extension my team and the work we spent countless days on.
Except that no one is insulting or the team. Despite your insistence that they are, no one blames TBP 3.4b for having bugs. The team did the best they could and no one is disrespecting the hard work involved to make 3.4b. The problem is that you and you alone decided to stand in the way of fixing those issue. If you didn't want to do the work involved, that's absolutely fine. But when you tell other people who are willing to do the work that they can't, then that is an issue. When you came back a few years ago, it was only to insult and belittle the work done on Zathras. You tried very hard to make sure that the only way people could play TBP now would be on 3.6.9 and then have to cheek to try to blame the SCP's poor backwards compatibility for the fact that stuff that was broken on 3.6.9 would still be broken on 3.7.4 8 years later. If you'd gotten your way either we'd have pulled TBP completely from HLP, or we'd have been forced to stop supporting it in any way (including Zathras).
So you shouldn't be surprised that your name has become synonymous with deliberately making poor decisions that end up crippling your mod in completely unnecessary way.
I'd be happy to call it all water under the bridge and move on. But that's not going to happen if you keep turning up every year or so to rip into people who are working hard to fix the issues with this mod that your decisions allowed to.