Do we actually want people to play the game, though? I'm not willing to commit to reading several FAQs, searching google, and searching forums in order to be able to install one game. At that point, I'm going to decide that whoever is doing the game doesn't have their act together, and I'm not going to have anybody to play with. If I don't quit, I'm going to seriously question if I want to spend that much time on it - unless it has something I really want, I'm not going to keep on going.
Yeah, it's selfish, but I've learned that as a rule of thumb it's correct (mostly from experience with Linux). Something that's well-polished, that won't cause trouble for its users, has an easy-to-use install process. Something that isn't has you do anything from a generic installer with glaring faults to build the whole program, and then have a half-dozen config files you need to modify afterwards, and then it crashes all the time and has allergies to something else on the system, etc etc.
Most people don't even have that experience, and so they're not even going to be able to get past things not working in an extremely straightforward manner. If they're a gamer, they're not necessarily a programmer or even a very good computer user. The point of the installer is to get an audience for the people that are not going to need the hand-holding, and maybe rope in a few people who get interested enough to take a few steps on their own.
I would say (off-the-cuff) that the installer shouldn't need to take anything more than a little bit of hardware advice and it should be able to install Freespace 2. Just click-click-click. The default directory can be set to C:\Program Files\Freespace2, like everything else, or (probably better) it can default to the directory pointed to by the FS2 uninstall string in the registry, if it exists. The default installed items can be FS2_Open, FRED, Launcher, MediaVPs, and maybe Derelict or something else that's good and doesn't cause a lot of extra download time.
The technology is there to do all this autodetection better than most users are capable of. The point of writing an installer is to make things easier for people, not to serve as some screener for people to join our boys-only club.
Now once somebody gets on the forums and starts whining about modding tables, then they get sent to the FAQs.
It would be nice to have some more passionate creative types around here, but nobody's going to commit to a game with a development team that intentionally goes out of its way to exclude certain types of people from ever playing it, especially as niche a game as Freespace 2, because there's no gain in it for them. They might as well go and make a mod for Half Life 2, even if they have to do extra work to get a Freespace environment, Valve will be sure to ensure that it's as easy as possible to get things running, and they'll have a massive number of people who are guaranteed to already have the game to play their mod.
So in summary, bigger audience => more incentive to invest time/effort => more intelligent/committed people.
Compare the influx of coders/scripters prior to the installer and the big TCs to the period of time where the big TCs and installer made releases. You had to be a genius prior to that to figure out how to install things, or spend several hours on it, and we didn't get very many new people with skills at all. Now, we've got at least 5 coders who have contributed something through BtRL, and at least one scripter who claims there isn't enough for him to keep busy.
EDIT: That turned out into a little more of a soapbox than I intended.
