EQEmu's problem has never been coder skill or effort, but leadership. I've been with this project for longer than almost everyone except people like image, devn00b and other people from way the fuck back, and I don't think I have seen proper project leadership at any given point during all these years. I had a three-four month stint as forum administrator at one point, in addition to almost helping start a fork project shortly before that (though that's a story in itself), which made me privy to a lot of information about how the project runs, or at least ran.
The lack of a visible central administration point, such as a lead coder with authority over what's gonna happen and what direction the project is going in, is probably the biggest downfall of EQEmu and why it has, I believe, come to this point. There is noone to decide that the project needs more coders and that it should go out and try to find some instead of sticking to a policy that hasn't worked since the project came out of its infancy. There is noone to decide what tasks should receive priority over others, which has historically meant that coders felt more like making new features (that usually carried bugs with them) instead of fixing bugs with the code. Moreover, criticisms such as these have usually resulted in an array of "dood we do this for free we can do w/e we want b/c we are like samaritans and do this out of the great goodness of our hearts" - while that's true, it's also just a nicely masked way of saying that you don't really care about the project's well being, usability and success. There's a number of other problems stemming from the lack of a leader figure, but I'm sure you can figure them out (such as the tolerance for devteam drama).
Dood, FNW, I've worked with both of you and you know I think you're great people (and coders!). But you're not leaders, and I believe there's no way you can keep hammering away at your keyboards until the problem goes away. I have no real self interest in seeing EQEmu succeed anymore, but I still want it to because it's a project that lots of people have put a lot of time into, and seeing it slowly die from unwillingness to change makes me sadface.
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