[The E]

See, that's the thing here: We're very much carrying a large amount of technical debt owing to the fact that a lot of coders have worked on this engine for years, and while it was rather robust when we got it (and is rather robust at the moment), there's still a bunch of stuff we have to support, some of which being decidedly fragile.

It got so bad at some point that we had to dedicate 4 releases almost entirely to fixing bugs and correcting regressions (3.6.12, 3.6.14, 3.6.16, 3.6.18), with little in the way of big new features introduced. It's very much a matter of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it", and so we see proposals to reengineer huge parts of the engine with a large amount of skepticism.

And during all that, we have to keep an ear out for what the people using this engine to create content want from it, to figure out how we can help them create awesome games. Shutting down development for a year is not something we want to do again, because if we do, it means pissing off what in a normal software development environment would be our customers.

[masteripper]

See, that's the thing here: We're very much carrying a large amount of technical debt owing to the fact that a lot of coders have worked on this engine for years, and while it was rather robust when we got it (and is rather robust at the moment), there's still a bunch of stuff we have to support, some of which being decidedly fragile.

It got so bad at some point that we had to dedicate 4 releases almost entirely to fixing bugs and correcting regressions (3.6.12, 3.6.14, 3.6.16, 3.6.18), with little in the way of big new features introduced. It's very much a matter of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it", and so we see proposals to reengineer huge parts of the engine with a large amount of skepticism.

And during all that, we have to keep an ear out for what the people using this engine to create content want from it, to figure out how we can help them create awesome games. Shutting down development for a year is not something we want to do again, because if we do, it means pissing off what in a normal software development environment would be our customers.

I understand...i think i got all the answers....thanks for your time...

[Mongoose]

I think the thing to remember is that coding features and paradigms and whatnot should be viewed as means to an end, not necessarily something to be valued for its own sake: they're all meant to produce programs that perform certain tasks, and everything else is gravy.  The FSO engine performs reasonably well (given certain tolerances of the term "reasonable") and is reasonably understandable (see above), so overhauling it to a new paradigm just for the sake of doing so doesn't serve any real purpose, not to mention introducing all sorts of external issues as The E explained.

(Of course I may be saying this because my initial introduction to OO elements like classes and operators back in college produced a strong reaction of "fut the wuck"...)