I've played Transcend only recently and in my opinion, Blue Planet exceeds it.
I noticed you didn't actually attempt the challenge, however, and even rendered no actual opinion on my statement.
FRED'ing
Cutscenes
More than anything, this statement betrays a deep ignorance. Transcend is the most FRED-effort-intensive campaign I've ever seen released (PI and Alakabeth's "Meditations" following very closely), and while BP had some impressive uses of the cutscene engine, no visual effect in FS has ever matched that of the Transcendant's exploding Pegasus tumbling past over my head in slow-mo as I pitch up.
For that matter, Transcend is as far as I know the only released user campaign that includes an
actual cutscene as opposed to ingame footage.
hell it even introduced new small clips of 'command' speaking. Never seen a campaign do that before.
If you find one that does, let me know.
The head ani's? Not hard. Babylon Project has new ones taken from clips of the show. WC conversion has new head anis whose origin I am uncertain of. Inferno SCP's supposed to have all-new custom render ones. TopAce released a campaign featuring at least one all-new one. Shivan ones exist but they are still the property of those campaigns which generated them and have yet to be released to the general public. And finally, if you didn't recognize the head anis from SupCom, that's...a little sad.