There has been a general trend towards insufficient thought put into code quality and the actual gameplay merit of new features, not only by new and regular contributors but also by developers themselves. This has been magnified by a few low points where the three major devs have been less active than usual, reducing the oversight over less-experienced devs who are not as competent at coding and game design.
The vehicle changes are a solid example of this. They introduced many bugs, balancing complications, and code regressions. I wasn’t around to see the PRs that broke it, so I dunno whether it was a “didn’t think this through” code change or an out-of-the-blue complication that caused all these issues. But it would’ve been less likely to occur if the developers weren’t so swamped.
This is related to a “dev crisis” that was discussed on Github previously. They’re having to do more and more maintenance and been swamped because of a lower number of active developers, and they’ve repeatedly taken a self-destructive approach towards handling the influx of tasks that must be done. Less code testing, less mod checking, etc. I’ve griped about the attitude towards checking and testing mods too, as that was one example of a poorly-thought-out response to insufficient manpower.
The reason I griped was because that putting off basic idiotproofing when the PR is being worked on means more things break down the line. This creates MORE work for the community as a whole. Some of it comes back to bite the devs in the ass and make them have to work harder in the future, but a lot of the resulting burden is handled by contributors instead.
And I suspect that the increased work generated is seen as acceptable by some of the developers because the resulting increased work is spread out over the developers and contributors as a whole. I do believe Mugling himself has referred to similar attitudes (in another context) as antisocial, and this attitude is by my reasoning a strong example of this.
EDIT: Corrected myself. Term was merely “antisocial” not “anti-social programming,” and as now stated was used in a different context that the current discussion. But again, said remark is on-point outside context as well.
