Here's a serious suggestion that I'd like feedback on, and I think it was mentioned earlier by a few people but relatively glazed over.
What if we open the dev forums? Completely. Allow for submissions, which the devs yay, nay, and give feedback on. It's done like this in dozens of mods for other games, some of the more popular are Tamriel Rebuilt and Skywind. In order to get onto the dev team, people post a sample of their work. This would lighten the actual workload of the devs we have now by giving them people to delegate to and allow them to work on more conceptual things, like balancing trade, PvP, et cetera.
This open developer's community would, hopefully, attract outside developers with a love for space sims. They would maybe bring a few fans along with them and, overall, allow for faster growth. If people saw that the community was developing rapidly, dynamically, and invited everyone to participate in the development, I think we would be more appealing.
If people like this, I say we write up a formal proposal to the powers that be. I'd volunteer my Thomas Jeffersonian hand.
