The future of Dominions

[Beorne]

First of all sorry of my written english that is not so good.
I am worried about he future of the game I love most, Dominion. It is at least 4 years that is almost the
only game I play, in mp, starting from DomII in 2004.
I have seen that the support of the game engine is tweaking. There are a discrete amount of bugs, some
severe, some less severe, that have not been tackled in months, some in years. there are a lot of (from my
point of view) simple feature request that are years old and that could improve much the play experience.
The devs are saying the game engine is old, patched and garbled so any improvement is difficult. In addition
they will not work on DomIV cause the huge amount ow work in reworking all the engine and their interests on
other projects.
I'm not saying the game is not supported, ko is working hard to add new race and a lot of "color" on the
game, (we all know the excellent ko work is the key of the success of this title), and the most severe game
disrupting bugs are managed in sort time. And I know this is their 2nd work.
My selfish proposal is to free the game to the public and to build an open developing community around this
to rework all the engine and to add quality content in a controlled way. In my view ko an jo should be very deep into
this, atively developing ad coordinating all. I'd like very much that the good contributors that are in this forum
(tackling bug raports, creating mods and much more) would be integrated in the process of Dom developing.
I know that for one very good open game project (Wesnoth) here are ten others that slowly die, but I don't
think, given the level of Dom community, this would happen. On the other side I have no idea nor experience
about open projects, so my observatios coul be faulty.
I'd like to know what do you think about this, knowing that, obvioulsy, this is a decision only due to the
legitimate rights owners.
One last: this is not a price issue, given the value of the game I could pay 100$ for DomIV.