I feel pretty much in the same camp as Becky (if I've followed her post correctly), but I'll just add in some personal perspective..
The devs do what they want. I think anyone who's bought S2 has gotten their monies worth by now. The game performs well, is virtually bug free, controller support is good, technical support is ongoing, most features are up to professional standards or soon will be etc. The devs should be answerable to no-one at this point in terms of what's been actually paid for. LFS represents truly major value for money. (I never paid for it so I have even less of a reason to complain).
Alas, this level of autonomy- whilst being touted as highly desirable and good for the consistency and quality of LFS, can actually tick some people off a bit. I'm sure most of the community has felt at times that their own long requested feature has been held back yet again because the developers had decided to work on something much less important/interesting/whatever... Sometimes it's very funny to watch, because Scawen has never reacted like you might expect the typical public relations guy of a big, faceless software company to react- all apologies and reassurances and 'yes sir, we'll get right onto that, sir'... customer is always right type attitude... He's never been apologetic, and the customer has been hardly ever right!
That's LFS the friendly dictatorship for you, and it's o.k.
That still leaves the community though, dealing with a game that's still unfinished, with announcements of updates which can unfortunately take years to materialise, and a fairly considerable (in the opinions of some) content drought. In some ways, this is no way to play a game, as it inches along slowly into Beta status. People are used to playing games
after they're finished. If you can get used to that, and focus on
now, then LFS can be tons of fun. But because of it's ongoing nature, some people tend to look to the future more, imagine what's coming, form ideas about what could/should happen.. we can get stuck in the future.
One way to deal with that is to get creative, with the desire to help that future along. If people are bored, they can make skins, or promotional videos, try their hand at making better sounds, better textures, suggest improvements, etc. My own thing is that I'm alternately inspired and bored by the slow graphical progress of LFS. I joined just after the big patch with the BF1, so have only seen one new car and one new track config the whole time I've been here (as well as a fairly significant graphics update for SO). That inspires me sometimes to want to make things better- the recent patch has helped a lot because it says that Eric is indeed working away somewhere, and it helps me to do the same. Unseen and I are about to release a new compatible texture pack for patch Z. I think if the interiors weren't in that patch, I wouldn't have bothered. But we're kicking along, happy to be doing this stuff again. In love with LFS again. Again.
So, yeah- I don't expect anything really, but still have a lot of old hopes pinned on LFS, and a personal vision of what I hope it can become. If the devs own vision just happens to exceed my own, then everything is surely fine...
