Indeed. It's not like people typically submit bug reports with the preface "I've been messing around with the database and I blew it up." It's usually more along the lines of, "Your game blew up." He will give you the password on request; the only reason it's done by request is so that he can keep track of who has passwords to the database and thus can know to follow up should that person later submit a bug report that looks odd from a database standpoint.
There's that, and also the sort of recognition that, externally, working on a game that's already cursed by the language it's written in that renders it extremely slow. Pulsar hasn't had a complete engine yet, but it's open source and a lot of the processes are already significantly faster in C# than whatever the heck aurora was written in. In the long term, it's just simply better if developers focus their efforts on that, rather than try to mess around with improving aurora as it is.
The people who are personally invested in Pulsar have been talking it up for a long time and nothing has ever come of it. Cata:DDA it ain't.
Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see it in a playable state... but I don't think it will ever get there and am not particularly motivated to sink my own time into someone else's failing project when I already enjoy Aurora as it stands. Granted, Steve took a decade to get Aurora from the first release to 6.43, but he also did it alone as a hobby that often was interrupted by real work while using a suboptimal format. Pulsar's been working in a better environment with multiple contributors since 2012 and they still don't even have the engine finished. :|
I think the big issue overall is the lack of motivation and passion into this new project, on top of the apparent lack of audience.
Also the fact that making a new engine from scratch is /hard/, especially when the people who work on it just simply can't spend as much personal time on it or even have as much experience programming it up like that. Not that I'm saying all of these are the strictest case, but it's all true for one dev or another on this project at this time.
Honestly, at least trying to contribute to the project will provide some learning experience, it's why I'm trying to read up on C# and might make some contributions in the next few months if possible. But you don't need to feel obligated to work on it if you don't want, though.
Anyway, a small digression, does anyone know a quick location i can find the 6.50 version download straight out? I kinda want to get to playing again but patching is a whole big nightmare in of itself...