Highly inadvisable dead horse post time.
You made comparisons to other projects in the past (in that topic you just pointed me to). What I have to say about it is that those are unfair comparisons. The projects you mentioned, not only cut corners for a release, but they also have double (or more) of our staff.
I obviously can't see your internal, so I don't know which mods were mentioned. But I seem to recall one released just a little bit under a year ago that, as you say, cut some corners to get out the door. There was no voice-acting. The majority of the missions featured at least one instance of an appallingly unoptimized capital ship that had 20 or so textures and no LODs or debris. Most appallingly corner-cutting of all, the release was chopped in half and the first part released before (afaik) any real work had even started on the second.
NOBODY GAVE A ****. AT ALL. Everybody except Trashie loved it.
If you have similarly good writing and gameplay and take it across fifty missions, BWO
will win near-universal recognition as the best mod to ever be released for this game, just as WiH did. This will happen with or without HTL models and voice-acting.
It's not as if I don't understand either. Most of BWO's model designs are pretty much set in stone. This makes any potential creative contributions (creativity being a driving force for doing the actual work) that much less of a factor when the people with talent would consider taking on the job. Unfortunately, the designs we have are very specific and need to remain in place, as opposed to just scrapping them and solving the problem by having new people come in to do whatever they want.
No offense intended here, but I don't think that's the problem.
A problem, yes.
The problem, no.
The problem is that over the last half-decade, the community has stopped holding its breath and moved on with its life. BWO is no longer universally regarded as the elite of the elite when it comes to campaigns, like it was six or seven years ago. You could give the community's modelers and mappers all the creative control they could possibly ask for, and they'd still much rather devote their time and talent to a publicly active project with a resultantly active following and considerable existing acclaim than to a languishing albatross that has spent the better part of the last decade waiting for the rest of the community to drop what they're doing and ride to the rescue.
Do something to get people excited about this mod again, and that's prone to change. I'm not sure what the best way to go about that is, but publicly announcing that you're all but dead in the water barring a radical expansion of the team is probably a very bad start.