The main thing that makes me feel like this is a bit of a bad-faith PR is that Erk outlined suggestions for mods that're being actively maintained, and none of this information was utilized by the PR author. :/
The thing that makes me feel this is a bad-faith pr is the history of all this bs. Kevin and his crew have a history of driving away anyone who doesn't agree with his vision of a fun free and tedium infested "game". And hey, they work for free, they're free to have that vision. But the fact that they aggressively took over this project and drove away everyone else, and having accomplished that, are now breaking old promises about their half baked "realism" bullshit. The filthy clothes thing is a perfect encapsulation of all that.
What is filthy clothes? It was a change made so zombie worn clothing got a "filthy" tag, giving a big morale loss. The clothing can be washed, if you find the incredibly rare ingredients to wash it. Of course, it's just clothing, so why would you go through a complex procedure like that? Nobody would, nobody does, the filthy clothes might as well not exist.
However, they do exist. And they show up in a garish, ugly font. They create a bit of an early game obstruction to acquiring top end clothing. It's not an insane idea, honestly, but the implementation left a lot to be desired. Lots of people hated it. But no problem, said Kevin and crew! Simply use the built in option to disable this! So OK, problem solved. Of course some of us said "Just wait a bit, they'll find a way to force it on us". And we were dismissed as overly negative jerks who just hate Kevin.
And now, here we are. Here's a question: If the "no filthy clothes" mod is just too hard to maintain (yeah right) why not just make the incredibly unpopular filthy clothes nonsense a "mod"?
We're being asked (demanded really) that we just forget the history of all this. We're being gaslit to ignore the obvious fact that a certain contributor or group of contributors get their fun from forcing their vision onto others. That'd be a crazy thing to claim out of the gate, but we are not right out of the gate here. There's a history.
And the BS semi-diplomatic "Oh you entitled gamers" schtick is old. It's been old for a long time. Yeah, we all know, and intimately understand, volunteers do the work they volunteer to do, they owe use nothing. I am not asking for extra work. I'm saying "Rather than doing a bunch of work to ruin this good thing, instead please do nothing".
Or, failing that, don't expect me to cheerlead you while you brag about how well you're ruining this while throwing snide jabs at the people who've been playing this for a long time and have witnessed the iterative process of locking out the main playerbase in favor of Kevin and friends.
You seem like a nice enough guy, I don't mean to insult you personally Erk, but at the same time, don't piss on my head and tell me it's raining.