mad fred, you are also right that much of addons would be below the standarts vstep wants to have, but on the other hand when you lock any chance to develop something there will SURELY be no new ideas from the community.
Well, actually, there is much more interaction going on between developer and customer/entusiast than you may realise. The developers get constant feedback, directly from players, or the forum and also though us, the moderators and administrators. And there are quite a number of community members that contribute this way and there's allready plenty of game content that has been created via that method.
But it's just not as obvious perhaps, as with sims that have opened up all the doors for each "wannabe modeler" (I dont mean that negatively) to put their work into the sim. It's all done somewhat more 'behind the scenes' and all ends up as official and therefor better suited, game content.
So there actually is a chance for people to offer VSTEP their help/suggestions/ideas/models/etc.. but not just everyone can go out and change things. This is much better in my opinion. It gives the really good people a chance to get in touch with VSTEP and offer what they've got, and keeps the people that are less good, or maybe even total novices from possibly harming the game rather than enhancing it.
So it's not as locked as you think it is, to be honest. And there's not many good developers out there in the community that can just whip up an inprovement of the waves, anyway. VSTEP are perfectly capable of doing that themselves, but it's not just a case of making them look good. There's a heck of a lot more behind it, dynamics wise. What good are great looking, huge waves, if the ships behave surreal.. Again, I could compare it to "the other one". Nice looking waves, totally off as far as handling goes.. And yeah, I do own it and have tried just about every ship that the community made. Just a handfull are good of a thousand or so downloads. So that renders the sim aspect of things useless, really.
Regards,
Fred