Read some of the thread, not going to do it all (bloody tired).
I read a few interesting things though, at the start, someone said how great chess was because of how mathematicaly it allowed you to basicaly derive so many variations. I instantly thought of SFC3 then, simply because of how customizable it was and what the modders have run with. Each ship can be tuned and tweaked, flown vastly differently. The variety of battles I've had with SFC3 and the varying tactics used has been great. For the better players, they too have a huge amount of variety, somewhat like the chess analogy.
I've never played SFC2, but did 1 and 3. So honestly, I can't run it down one way or another (not that I'd like to). But SFC3 did keep me comming back for a long time, and I'm as much a fan of games like MOO as I am of UT. So eh, I find criticsm of SFC3 to be just in only a few cases, but sometimes people just seem to run it down because its not SFB.
I reckon there are enough tallented folk in the SFB community and ST community, to develop a PC game of SFB. It'd be great to see that side of the player base go and make what they really want, rather than wait around forever for a developer to never quite make it. Then maybe they could stop hating SFC3 for not being their perfect game, when really, its simply not as bad as they sometimes make out.
SFC4 would be great, but a huge rethink on past mistakes would be needed. But with a dwindeling ST fan base, what publisher is going to take that risk and looking at these forums, what developer would either?