You might also want to consider the fact that modding using FS2O is most of the time a highly annoying and retarded process. You have to work with a crappy mission editor, a very crappy model conversion tool as well as nonexisting tolerance for mistakes of any kind combined with a crappy lack of useful error messages and a lack of or just poor documentation.
Of course that's not what you were asking about, but it seems irresponsible not to mention. 
And no, I'm not attacking anyone here so spare the flames.
try modding freelancer and im sure that view would rapidly change.
id say of all the major issues with the modding tools, its the model importer. having had several model converters and export utilities since fs modding kicked off, the thing that bothers me most is that we can get satisfactory conversions only by using one model format, namely cob, a proprietary, rarely used format for a modeling program that cant even do the kind of modeling that works best for freespace. i did not mention collada because the only pcs2 builds that support it (i believe there are only two), would be considered by most programmers to be unstable test builds which are full of bugs and annoyances.
granted there have been exporters for other formats and plugins for modeling programs have been made. i was a big fan of styxx's max plugin even long after it got its reputation for chewing up a model's collision detection data. direct conversion is really the only way to produce a reliable polygon format for the converter as the artist originally intended. using intermediary formats, polygons get stored in oddball ways which can lead to data misinterpretation at the parser. its like playing telephone with polygons. the ways a format stores polygons can be very different, where the polygon is stored as a single entity, verts, uv coords, normals, etc. another program/format may want to lump all the verts into a section, all the polygons in another section (using an index or reference to another set of data). a format may store polygons without regaurd for what its connected to, adding an element of guesswork to a conversion process. avoiding unnecessary imports/exports to intermediate formats is critical to maintaining stable geometry.
instead of trying to find a jack of all trades format to use as a conversion source, what we should be doing is supporting as many formats as possible, through import code, plugins for a wide range of modeling software, etc. granted pcs2 was a big improvement over the tools we had at the time, i just wish it would evolve beyond its current state. on the bright side it was a hell of a lot better that the kinda tools freelancer had
