Gaming is now in the new age of pay-for-play servers. The idea is that you pay a monthly subscription to finance developers to improve the game product on a perpetual basis. SWG and EVE are a couple of examples of this practice.
SFC family games are the stand-alone pay once, patch a couple times and then that's it for developer support of the game. Anything else is subject to the vagaries of volunteer help. Plus, whatever open source code you can get a hold of. A pretty chaotic process at best.
Basically, it comes done to the fundamental rules of business: you get what you pay for.
You want active F/T developers, backed by years of commercial game development experience, to work on your game to make it be all it can be? Then you need to looking for perpetual games and start paying a monthly fee. If you don't want to pay then you can't complain.
SWG just sold 1 million copies and has a few hundred thousand monthly subscribers. If SFC ever did that then Taldren would still be developing this game and GAW would have been done years ago and the SQL server kit would have been on it's tenth robust version release by now. But, to substantially rebuild the SFC playerbase to where it was in 2003 under the current volunteer help conditions is not very realistic. Without the current volunteer help, the game's playerbase would probably cease to exist, so it's more in survivalist mode. Nowadays, most online gaming players will and do prefer to go for pay-for-play games cuz the product is more robust and has more content and is basically a better game. It better be if you are paying a monthly fee. 
We'll see if Star Trek Online can do the same as SWG. Although, it won't have SFC stuff cuz it's set 20 years in the future relative to the movie Nemesis.
I don't buy that at all. It's a cash grab, plain and simple. Add it up. Its obscene. Waaay more than you need to finish developing a complicated game. Eve is written in python and and uses a clustered database backend, couldn't be simpler. Want to truly support Eve development? Donate to Python and MySQL. 
Depending of which state they work in the US, you are looking at probably low-ball min. 90K annual salary and benefits for a prime-time commercial game developer that would even start to look at the bugs in the SFC game assuming it was setup like EVE as pay-for-play. In CA, it's a lot more. In TX, it's better. NY is obscene, SouthEastern states are not too bad.
That's just one developer. Never mind the support staff, business rental fees, legal dept., PR dept. and all the sys. admins. you need to support perpetual servers. Sure all of the work can then be off-shored but at the end of the day you are looking at substantial outlays.
What would would be the projected unit sales for an EVE-like SFC game? 1 million like SWG that has the power of 6 blockbuster Star Wars movies (ie. min. $300 million Y2005 US in domestic gross receipts) to back it up? Best Star Trek movie can hardly get by $100 million Y2005 US in domestic gross receipts.
SFC would definitely have to sell Paramount on being able to get min. 750K unit sales numbers to make an SFC EVE-like game possible. But, SFC cannot do this cuz its learning curve is way too high, so what you get is a dumbed downed Star Trek Online.
In conclusion, SFC will always remain a small hard-core fanbase game with minimal commerical developer support. So, it's gonna always be a buggy game. A game that was first designed by a Professional Engineer for very dedicated gamers to play on. That's not a big population pool to draw on.
Topic: Great server! Great Game! Where're all the players? (Read 6841 times)