Can someone explain why mod authors are still relying on internal resources from the MVPs which are too volatile to reliably use between versions? Would it not be better to take the (minor, in this day and age) hit for redundancy and package those resources into your own mod?
Well the thing is, while most people may have the filespace to manage this redundancy, having to eventually wind up with hundreds of megabytes' worth of duplicated texture or effect models just to ensure compatibility is a horribly-inelegant solution to the problem, at least as far as I'm concerned. As you said yourself later on, taken to the extreme, it's exactly what we have with the two sets of MediaVPs: two multiple-GB folders that represent, for all intents and purposes, a complete redundancy in function. During my recent Installer run-through to get everything up to date, I was basically gritting my teeth watching both of those download simultaneously. I like to keep my HDD as uncluttered as physically possible, so anything we could do with the aim of eliminating the Department of Redundancy Department would be a huge boon as far as I'm concerned.
I'm with mjn on this one. Trying to make the MVPs eternally backwards compatible is a futile endeavour. This whole discussion is based on a slight misunderstanding of what the MVPs actually are; they're not intended to be a big repository of mod assets, just a comprehensive upgrade package for FS2. That they've been treated as a community asset repository is, in my opinion, a wrong development.
That's the part I don't understand, though: why shouldn't the MVPs be viewed as something of a community repository? Obviously not in the sense of containing modding work that wasn't originally from FS2, but instead in the vein of serving as a gathering-place for any and all upgraded retail assets. It always made a lot of sense to me that various mods would reference MVP material, because they could be viewed as something of a universal baseline, which almost everyone playing the game would already have installed. I know the organization of the MVPs will by necessity change over time, but I think there's inherent value in establishing some sort of baseline structure to them, to the point where external mods can properly reference them. Think of it as an API for the MVPs, if you will.
(And as far as I'm concerned the whole tangent about upgraded models is one big non-sequitur, because in the
vast majority of cases, they're not the element presenting the actual compatibility problems.)