Right, a few things to clear up in that post.
First off, hurleybird, this is a rerelease of a campaign from a few years back. It was the sole and original work of Darius - not of a team. This version is just a polished up and voice acted version of that.
To address a few specific points:
The vishnan arc was lame, and you made the shivans feel very anti-climatic and hollow.
To be honest, I wasn't a big fan of the Vishnans myself originally, but after learning more about them and knowing future plans, I'm happy with them. They'll grow on you.
The mission design was far too straightforward linear, to the point were one non-critical capital ship being destroyed failed multiple missions. Good mission design means multiple potential outcomes from missions.
Au contraire. There is no way for the Blue Planet story to work if even a single ship is lost, because each vessel plays a role in later missions.
If each mission contained a branch for the loss of every possible combination of ships, then every later mission would need multiple dialogue stages to account for this, as well as missions built to account for the possible presence or absence of every permutation of ship.
It is not remotely practical.
You may not have noticed, but every ship from the first mission is maintained throughout the campaign. All the ships are critical.
The war with earth at the end was also a disappointment. It would have been nice to have more subtlety than "Oh no, command is evil and wants to invade earth because they're too religious and peaceful". There's absolutely no intrigue in that at all.
Another area where I would have once agreed with you, but where you're now badly wrong. In fact you're about as far from right as it gets. Start
here.Take a moment to read through this forum and you'll find so much intrigue on that point that nobody can seem to agree who's in the right and who's in the wrong.
only to bring the end experience back down to merely average with a poorly thought out story.
The story was not altered from the original release a couple years ago. While I'm personally in agreement with your critiques, between the thousands of words of prose information now online and the upcoming War in Heaven I think they're largely satisfied.
And the last thing this story was is 'poorly thought out.' You may disagree with stylistic choices, but on a structural level in terms of foreshadowing, it's marvelously subtle and complete. You can see the upcoming GTVA invasion as early as the first playable missions if you pay close attention, and the Vishnans are foreshadowed nearly as early on.
While I'm happy with many elements of your critique, you're conflating 'I don't like it' with 'it was done wrong.' Blue Planet isn't for everyone. The story requires a lot of attention, but the rewards are there.