The whole idea of a mod is to take someone else's work and utilize it in a different way then it was initially intended. When electricity was first discovered the light bulb wasn't developed the next day. Modern society is built upon the ever expanding implementation and further development of other's ideas. Without Bay12 doing the major development, none of the mods would be possible. Expanding on the work of one to create something new, is the entire nature of modding.
If a group of people hadn't started digging through the RAWs and determining what the tokens did, then others wouldn't have been able to leverage that knowledge to create their own mods. If the dfHack team hadn't started mapping out memory addresses and developing ways to read or change them, then others would not have been able to create the tools and scripts that many feel are necessary to truly enjoy the game.
Masterwork certainly does borrow from other mods and takes advantage of new developments in scripting. I would hope that the developers of those tools would be honored to see what their work has allowed others to accomplish. The same goes for mod creators. All of the originators of those developments deserve credit.
As mentioned previously, Meph handles all of the management and inclusion of those nifty tools, scripts, and mods that he feels would contribute to the MW mod. He helps other people benefit from all of the available tweaks that many view as enhancing the experience. He sees the value of a new script / plugin and is inspired with what it can do. The MW mod inspires others to see what they could do to benefit the community.
And now I will remove my nose from up his ass (as in "brown noser") and provide my criticisms.
I agree with a previous post about there being a stable, bug-free version of the mod. I drifted away from DF after the 4i version of MW came out and wanted to wait for the new release of DF before coming back. I'm not familiar with how development on v5 went, but previously, each update seemed to provide bug fixes to old issues, yet introduce new ones from new content being developed.
I dislike the magic, alchemy, harder mining, diseases, golems, among a few other things. I know I can disable much of them, but, I always wonder what doing so would potentially break.
Have all of the new metals / alloys added anything to the game - I don't think so. I thought the basis of this mod was to help increase FPS by removing the unnecessary materials and such that were essentially generic because many of them had all of the same attributes with different names and colors. Now it continues to add to the FPS issue by including other materials, that I feel are unnecessary. The standardizing of the materials is what initially drew me in to MW. Implementing other's mods without this initial goal in mind is not always a good thing.
Thanks, Meph for all the great work you have done. The sheer number of downloads of your mod indicates your influence on the DF community, whether it be good or bad.
TL;DR - you don't care what I have to say and I likely don't care what you have to say either.