FSO is not going to die some swift, mysterious death without the full-scale implementation of multithreading.
Nobody said that. We're just worried about the future of FSO. For now, it's still 'ok' to use only one core.
The CPU limitation of FSO is quite obvious though.
And no, the CPU load isn't
that horrible, when you play FS2.
However, once you put some more complex content in there, some of the outdated parts of the engine really get in your way.
Imagine putting in a fairly complex model into FSO. A really big and important ship and lets say it has 160k polygons.
That's a lot, but really not that big of a deal for any gfx card that isn't completely outdated.
Instead of the graphic system, the collision code will drag the performance down a lot.
The game becomes unplayable when you put many of them into your mission.
Now imagine you have one of those new Intel 6 core CPUs with HTT and only one of the 12 availabe threads in your task manager is at 100%, while all the others are at ~0%.
I think the problem is less FS2, but the mod projects. They need to be able to get more out of the game.
Edit: I hope nobody sees this as a rant. I'm not blaming anybody there and I'm not telling the coders how to do their jobs.
I'm just concerned and I really know that this is not an issue that can be solved easily.