Good post as always, don’t think there is a problem with me saying this, so hopefully people won’t get mad at me, but it might interest you to know that most, actually I think all the points you discussed and more were brought up and talked about at the LAN event, and my interpretation of the devs response was that they do “get it”, and do want the end goal to be something the hardcore community is also happy with, but due to other focuses such as increasing the playerbase being higher priority right at this moment we end up with slightly around-the-houses changes for stuff.
When you say stuff like you don’t want them to implement certain rumoured spawntime changes personally I’d choose to view this as a positive thing, because honestly the current spawntimer stuff works basically fine for public, so really any changes would be for us, the fact that they wish to re-visit it I hope they do listen to what’s needed, or at least let us test stuff out a bit more rather than everything being so “set in stone” (by which I mean the period of time between adjustments on some of this stuff is very long, and not that it’s never ever ever going to be improved).
But as you say they have to want to do it, to paraphrase something Fluffy_gIMp said, and I honestly believe is a core principle he believes in, “once we put the game out there it belongs to the community and not us anymore, so we’d be stupid not to listen to them”, all I’d add is “yes you would”.
