Why should I bloat my mods up by hundreds of megabytes rather than use external resources that work just fine? Dynamic linking has been standard in programming for years for a reason. To my knowledge you have never particularly cared about staying on the bleeding edge of SCP's graphics or other features, but some people do and it creates a lot of work for developers and a lot of wasted disk space for users. Using the mediavps is not "due diligence", it's an application of sound programming/design practice (dynamic linking) and a courtesy for people who don't want to download 800 megs of stuff they already have. This is actually an aspect that greatly annoyed me with TVWP--it would have been a smaller, leaner, and better-looking mod if it didn't waste space duplicating assets the mediavps already had.
Take your foot out of your mouth and do some research instead of jumping to conclusions. This is not about dynamic linking or graphical enhancement, this is about
functionality. A mod should
not require the mediaVPs in order to work, and it should be so for several reasons, the most important two of which have been explained on this forum ad nauseam for years. First of all, if your mod has a bug that the SCP team is trying to track down, it's a lot easier to debug the mod by itself (with the mediavps disabled) than to debug the mod plus mediaVPs. Second of all, there are users who
don't use the mediaVPs for whatever reason -- perhaps their computer can't handle them, perhaps they have retail nostalgia -- and they don't want to be forced to play a mod that requires the mediaVPs to always be turned on.
You forget the primary purpose of the mediaVPs is to
take existing assets and
upgrade them. That means that your mod should work without the upgrade. If you want to use a high-res fancy texture that the mediaVPs supply, then your default mod sans-mediaVPs should supply the low-res, basic texture. It shouldn't supply the high-res fancy texture itself -- if you think I'm saying that the mod should provide exactly what is in the mediaVPs in all respects, then you obviously don't understand the concept. If your mod takes advantage of the mediaVPs' enhanced functionality, then you need to make sure it provides its own foundational functionality.
And you also have several easily refutable misconceptions about TVWP. First of all, TVWP was developed independently -- and in a large part, actually
before -- the mediaVPs, so it has very little in common with them. Second of all, TVWP shares almost no models or weapons in common with the Port or retail FS2, so there's very little there for the mediaVPs to upgrade. And finally, the core download of TVWP is only 32.1 megabytes. The other 82.4 megabytes -- consisting of the brand new high-res interface, the glow/shine/normal maps, the backgrounds, and the rendered cutscene -- is entirely optional, and clearly marked as such, and TVWP was designed to run perfectly fine without it.