The community has changed a lot. There used to be no such thing as RP. People did complain about stuff, but they would try to help out to fix it as the modteam was pretty much just igiss. There were a ton of homeworld ships there, as well as swarm rocket pods and the most broken trade route ever, involving engine components, New Berlin, and a junker station.
Hahaha good memories... who remembers the Tau-31 trade spolit? A dozen trains shutting between Harris and the battleship parked next door, completely unmolested. Until someone told all pirates to get their butts into gear, lol. That was 4.80 IIRC.
But indeed the mod had grown many-fold since its inception. It really is quite amazing how the devs have managed to implement things the original FL designers never envisaged or accounted for. And all this without one line of source code. Pretty damn impressive.
And the imagination gone into the new Nomad systems... outstanding.