Luthier has said that they are in a position where the game will continue to be supported whether the community likes it or not. Whether one can pick this apart to continue to suggeest the game is in a difficult situation is anyone's choice, but clearly the game will continue to be developed and most likely will be around for a long time.
Is this pure conjecture? Conjecture with more substantial truth, maybe, which arguably holds more weight than pure speculation.
I think most people here hold interesting views (whether they diverge from one trend of fan-boyism and converge to another) however whilst such discussions can be interesting, history does show that future development updates do make such topics rather redundant.
Of course, whether the team deliver is another matter entirely, but I can't see any sim which in my eyes is better rounded than 1946 out of the box, so whilst it may have failed to live up to many's expectations, for new simmers it was a holy grail at the time. Nothing compares to it (unless you're only interested in a specific portion of history) and with the MODS in mind, it in itself has a very long future ahead of it, I'm sure.
I can see CloD being similar to Il-2 in this sense. The dev team are held by a contract (or, rather, a certain veil of ignorance in this sense) where patches and add-ons have to be of a fairly high standard. Whilst CloD may refute this, changes can't be made to the game which are of a 'shabby nature'. Take the mods for example; if you pick some brilliant ones apart, they can actually be quite shabby in design. I have a MOD for the Hurricane Mark 1 which adds the correct oval gunsight, (which another MOD member helped me with) and it is quite shabby. Use 6dof and the reticle appears on the cockpit canopy etc, but it does the job and looks extremely nice. There is no way in hell the team could release such an addition, and there-in lies the issues which are in-grained within expansion.
And, of course, one man's meat is another's poison; so whilst the team may be happy with certain changes, the community may not be.
Either way, I think CloD is just the tip of the iceberg.
