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[Lap]

Heh, my only hope is that if that is his actual stance that he sees some of these points and is able to reevaluate how he could open user generated content while still maintaining control over the core mechanics.

[chucks]

There's two things here at debate that I perceive.

1. Improvement and normalization of system raws and linkage and compositing of creature/civilization/area/item/material/etc descriptions.  There are criticisms of the current system in place about the method of object marshalling and object persistence representation.  Any system such as lex/yacc parsing, xml, ASN.1, SQL, flatfiles, INIfiles, bash/tcl/perl/python/ruby/lua/etc scripting, and many more others would work.  Any particular argument for one merely represents a poster's own personal preference and past academic or working experience.

2. There is a desire for deeper access and deeper influence on the core engine components and logic scripting of the game.

The developer of any application or system has the right to choose just how deep they allow the end users of a system access into.  There are fully true GPL enthusiasts that believe ALL software should be completely free and open for inspection and reading and modification by ANYONE with a copy of the system.

This is the concept of the bazaar style marketplace of cultures.

There are those that want to restrict access and software copy privileges of their software to anywhere from a mild to paranoid to completely draconian degree of access.  Some people only allow mild to medium access to their systems via their own routines designed to only allow certains depths of an automated or external or 3rd party system to a shallow depth of basic information retrieval or modification.  This is ENTIRELY the decision of the copyright holders and sometimes only a small handful of original authors.

This is the concept of the cathedral style marketplace of cultures.

Only Toady and whoever else holds the copyrights to df can make the decision about how far that they want the pendulum to swing for the future of their work.  However, it is a positive culture aspect to give some API or configuration access to various third parties to create new game content and additions to augment the playable features of the game and even give ideas to the upstream df development team for future features to add to the core game engine.