[Fyron]

That's rather alarmist, don't you think? SE4 invalidated all the SE3 shipsets too (which was good, because they were just a set of tiny icons anyways), as well ditching as the binary data file format in favor of plain text files (also good). There were several hundred shipsets made for SE3 that became useless for SE4... Should we decry that too? SE5 is just another evolution, with real models alongside the portraits, and formula-based data files. There wasn't anything that could be done to keep the static data file format around, without a huge amount of bug-prone code to try to shoe-horn it into the system. Same with the purely 2d nature of the shipsets... How do you advance the system with 3d and still support model-less sets? SE6 will almost without doubt use the same model format (and hopefully Aaron negotiated continued use of the models in future releases), and similar data files, perhaps with more functions or user-definable functions. I don't see anything "Microsofty" about it...