Looking at these replies I'm not sure if I should post. But what the hell, what's one more sob story?
In my case I've never been much of a player. I've skipped most mods, the past, present and future. Even the ones generally regarded as top of the cream. When it comes to FS, playing it doesn't really satisfy me. And ever since my MS Sidewinder Precision Pro broke, I've been unable to find a controller that I am comfortable with. I've tried several joysticks since then and none of them have the feel I'm looking for. Keyboard or keyboard and mouse aren't any good either, even if some of you swear by them. As time passed, I played less and less.
There has been long periods where I haven't played FS in years. In the past I've had at least two of these periods. The first was after I quit TBP. I felt I could no longer express myself in the B5 universe where everything had to follow the series and movies closely. My time was over there and I quit not only TBP, but FS too.
Roughly several years (!) later I decided to play FS again and picked Blue Planet: AoA by random chance. I really liked what Darius had created there and found out that he was in the progress of creating WiH. I somehow ended up joining the BP team. It was insane fun since I could once again be creative. I even modded for BP while I was at work. Though being based on FS and AoA, there were restrictions on creativity but far less than what TBP had. Lots of good things came out of it and I was pretty happy.
But eventually things changed. WiH part 1 development was nearing its end and closing into release. There was not many ways for me to express myself anymore. Most of that was now shouldered by mission designers since you really shouldn't change the modpack too much this late into the development.
After WiH part 1 was released. I pretty much fell into a slump. Even with WiH part 2 now in development, there just wasn't much for me to do since it was up to the mission designers to be creative. And at this point, they could create pretty much everything they desired themselves. As usual, playing missions wasn't really in my interests and when I did, it probably wasn't with appreciable results.
And because of the slump, stress had creeped up my scrotum and showing in my attitude as well. So I made the best decision I could at the time, I quit BP. I briefly did some work for FSU and Diaspore, which was over rather quickly for same reasons. I decided I should either work alone or quit modding altogether.
I tried to create a mod of my own but every time I picked it up, I quickly lost interest. It wasn't supposed to be anything but a gameplay tech demo anyway. But also because of that, I had no real motivation or drive behind it. And now it has been roughly six months since I last touched FSO.
So now, I'm nothing but a lurker. A lurker who no longer knows what the hell he should have done if not quit, knowing what happened in all those cases afterwards.
But regardless. Modding continues. As does playing. Just not from my part.
