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Likely won't happen, but yeah, this would be the ideal outcome for a lot of people, I think. Besides performance there is visual compatability with other mods, though the whole restock aesthetic thing (which is awesome and must-have, don't get me wrong) kinda broke it anyway. On the topic of visual style btw, this all also raises the bar for beginner modders and makes the learning curve steeper. Not sure what to think on that last point, just an observation, I guess.

Deferred doesn't work well on my machine, and Resurfaced causes texture issues with some mods on some settings (blankets on Boring Crew Services capsule, notably), but my problems are fairly specific, and I don't believe those problems would actually be fixed (Deferred seems to be a weird hardware/drivers issue). TUFX I do use but it's not something critical and would go first if I need optimisation. So I'm also not too stoked for this, as you defined it, new landscape, and with modded KSP moving towards higher required specs, more dependencies (remember when you only needed module manager to install tweakscale, pheh) and less stability in general. The growth of mod memory consumption is also a concern, basic Near Future pack already runs at, if memory serves me right, 3 gb or so, and if you want to have a planetpack or a couple more mods the GameData grows yet larger, not to mention graphics mods (which I would assume you just won't use at this point if you're concerned about performance). In something like 2017 I remember using a PC with 4 gb RAM for heavily modded KSP 1.3 and it was running fine (maybe not amazing but like, it worked), nowadays even 8 gb can feel constrained without a pagefile. Granted 4 gb is very much not a lot for a modern game, and most people have 8-16, but stock KSP on low settings runs on an abacus. Adding post-processing effects, shaders, etc doesn't make the situation better. I guess it would look cool at least, and if anything not updating to the PBR version is always an option...

Is it known what settings exactly mess with the panels? Can't be the texture resolution, surely, or anti-aliasing, or something of that nature.

I would suggest not advertising such projects, actually. If current forum is closed, it would be a tremendous loss, and a new forum can't entirely replace it. This forum accumulated userbase and content over a decade, it is the official forum which has been and currently still is promoted by KSP social media. KSP passed it's peak popularity, it seems (or at least we're in a slump period), community doesn't have fast growth, even if a new forum would be sucessfull, it will not have the same activity as old one, and inevitably speed up the decline of community through fragmentation and obscurity. Current forum is literally linked in game's launcher, to find the new one a new player would need to first get on reddit or such, and then find the link - additional steps for a person who might not be interested in a forum that much anyway. Current forum's data is being archived right now, several initiatives are underway. But I have doubts about how complete can conservation be, and whether it would be technically possible or even legal to "carry over" the posts, threads etc to the new forum. Of course, carrying over the accounts is almost out of the question, I don't see how this can be done at scale with official forum down (right now perhaps it can be possible to implement some "you write a request on this forum from your account, administrator of new forum somehow gives you acess to account on new forum", but, ehh...). Realistically, the best we can hope for is a somewhat complete archive of current forum - a husk of broken links and missing images - and a new forum with a fraction of the active users. Which is better than no forum, and a lot of people would appreciate this (I am one of them). But. Creating a new forum (and even archiving) can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the community has a new place, we wouldn't have as much will to fight for the old one, and whoever makes decisions on existance of this forum can just shut it down to cut on expences, seeing as the community has already moved on. And considering that any new forum will not be a proper replacement, this is a bad outcome. So I won't speak on the prospective details of the "new forum" idea. If it comes to that, perhaps the community on Reddit or Discord can come together and make something. But this is not inevitable, let's not make the situation worse.

Could community pay? I mean, could there be ways, however unlikely, for the community to completely or partially take over the management of the forum, some kind of deal?

AFAIK no, but would be nice if someone made this

If people want, I can make new higher quality models in Blender, through I'll likely need help with the rest (animation, texturing and importing into KSP)

Can i humbly ask if Epsilon is in the cards?

Hyyype, thank you. This is one of my favourite mods, it's great, goes just so well with everything

I will pitch in on harassment being a very bad idea. But to be clear, ...if -

On the other hand, gyros in KSP are also buffed

They all look so good! Are you open to sharing them?

What if the reactor is heavy enough so the centre of gravity is close to the engine? Plus or minus some possibility of thrust vector offset (not nessesarily in flight, perhaps the thrust is angled from the start)?