in game realism

[Snark]

13 minutes ago, wumpus said:

Were they that hard to write if there were competing aero fixes?

In a word, yes.

Bear in mind that from a software development perspective, actual shipping product has to meet a very different bar than a mod does.  There are lots of things that a mod can get away with that shipping product can't:

• A mod can require higher CPU loads or more powerful graphics cards.  Shipping product has to work for everyone.
• A mod can have more bugs in it.  Shipping product has more stringent quality requirements, because people paid money for it and are within their rights to complain if it doesn't work perfectly.
• A mod can make gameplay decisions that many (perhaps most) players would disagree with.  Shipping product has to satisfy as much of the community as they can.
• A mod can be arcane or cryptic to use.  Shipping product has to put a lot of attention into easy-to-use UX and flexible settings.
• A mod can turn on a dime and release an update-- or many updates-- if it goofs and doesn't get something right the first time.  Shipping product has to go through a testing-and-release cycle, which is extremely labor-intensive and time-consuming.

...And so forth.  Plenty of reasons, but they basically all boil down to the fact that a mod author can say "well, if you don't like it, don't use the mod", whereas a game author can't.  So just because someone can do something in a mod doesn't mean that it's a no-brainer that they could slip it into the actual shipping product.

13 minutes ago, wumpus said:

another part was the inevitable unwillingness to break legacy systems

I don't think that's correct.  I have the strong impression that Squad always intended to have better aero, reentry heating, etc. from the get-go (at least, from a long time before 1.0 arrived), and that it was a matter of needing to get other stuff out of the way first.

 

[wumpus]

14 minutes ago, Snark said:

I don't think that's correct.  I have the strong impression that Squad always intended to have better aero, reentry heating, etc. from the get-go (at least, from a long time before 1.0 arrived), and that it was a matter of needing to get other stuff out of the way first.

My understanding was that KSP development was pretty vague (it was originally planned as 2d), but eventually there was a list of things needed for 1.0.  The writing was on the wall for a long time, and I knew I would miss the mad science days of steampunk style wedding cakes comprised of huge layers of RT-10s (going to the Mun with stock parts was a goal of mine, even if I had the official copy and needed KE).

And there certainly were a bunch of ragequits.  They might have accepted it as a cost of releasing for 1.0 but they were there.