I'm tempted not to post this, purely because the point has been made an awful lot.
From reading your post, and your replies, it seems to focus around a few main points:
- The mods are entities. They have a personality, a life of their own.
- The users of such mods have a right to input/control.
Both of these points are false. The mods are projects of the developers. As such, they are, fundamentally, theirs. If they are released under GPL (or a variant therein), then the code is open source, and modification, etc. is invited. You can take large swathes of it to incorporate into your own mod (provided you also use the GPL). You can make changes, and you can make improvements. However, the main project is still controlled by the author. The directions that they want to take are their own, and there is absolutely no requirement to listen to anyone else at all.
Let's put this into perspective. (Metaphor time, yay!). Lets say that, tomorrow, you write a book. You write a book about Pirates. It's not a perfect book, but you have enjoyed following the characters as they developed, and you have published it so that others can too. The next day, someone comes along and says that your book is bad because it didn't contain dinosaurs, and that you should change it to include dinosaurs. You would rightly send them away with a swift denial. Dinosaurs have no place in your story, and there would be no way to keep the tone, and to introduce them.
Then someone else comes to you. They say that the book is very good, but there wasn't enough about the sails, and how they were made and used. This gets you wondering. Sails do play a part in the story (they make the boats move), but you've just sort of assumed that they were there, and not paid too much attention to them. You think that a book about the sails could be done, but it would be quite boring, and you don't know much about the topic anyway. You send this person away with a much kinder denial, but a denial, nonetheless. If they want to write a book about sails, then that's fine, but it's not something that you want to do.
A final person comes up to you, and says that they really enjoyed the book, but say that it just left the characters hanging there, there was no closure, and that you need to write another book. You say that you do not wish to write another book, you're currently interested in some other projects that you're working on, but you might get around to another version when they're sorted out. The person then says that you need to correct some errors in your book, like on page 83, when the main character goes into the kitchen in the back of the ship, but galleys had their kitchens in the front of the ship. You say that it's all very good, but that sort of change would be quite a lot of work, and, as you said, you have a lot of work on.
The person then says that he seen that you are working on a collaboration with a few other writers. The proofreaders have been leaking aspects of the book, and he's annoyed about it. He thinks that you should focus on listening to your readers a bit more, and less on talking to your friends, and writing your fun collaboration. At this point, you start getting annoyed. This person is demanding things of you just because he liked your book? There's no reason for him to have any input into your work at all! You send him away, and go back to discussing where Peter the Pirate is sailing to next.
Now, I'm aware that you are annoyed that various mod devs seem to be paying more attention to each other than to you, but my general response is that that is their right. I'm not going to try and tell anyone how to spend their time.
If you want to contribute to projects which allow it, then you are welcome to do so, if you want to start a new one, or extend an old one, then that is also your right. What is not your right, however, is trying to dictate what someone else does with their work, because it doesn't fit with what you think it should.
