I understand where your coming from, but we've been working on various things for some time now (simultaniously) and had hoped to release them as they were completed as a suprise. Little information was given out for that reason - we wanted to say "hey look, all this stuff is here now!" when it's done, but "and I've added another ship to the database today" every time that happened. Unfortunately (through no deliberate action of anyone else) we had to show our hand now or watch all the work we put into everything go forgotten as people said "nice, you copied this off NeoHunter (or whoever)".
As for the "unique" thing... AFAIK the truth is we've been planning the ship database pretty much since Setekh and I got heavily into rendering, as we both said "hey, we're doing this database, it'll take time but why not convert the models?". Since then various other people have converted various other things and put them up for download.
As the project(s) near completion we're increasingly anxious that people don't waste their efforts by doing something thats already done (or by making it seem like our work was inspired by something else).
I'll talk about the situation with the staff and see how things are going, but believe me the scale of what we have to do just now is quiet massive, and as I've said so many times - I don't want to have our work ignored by design or accident.
God, it sounds really selfish looking back at it - but how would you feel if a project you'd been working on for months was suddenly forgotten because a couple of people did something (by accident) that was the major part of that project. You'd be upset right? we'll so it is with us, I'm trying to be fair enough it but we frankly don't want to have wasted our efforts.
