Well, I think we can safely assume that the market for subsims is pretty much a goner unless a new independent company rises up and develops the subsim of our dreams. With the most outstanding saga of the genre going haywire, seems like we'll be stuck with the same titles for a veeeery long while.
While I don't doubt that SHO could indeed be fun and all that (haven't tried it yet), specially since I've played a few MMOs, so it's not like I despise the genre, I think that (and I'm sure lots of people will agree with me) it wasn't the way to go. Lots of things could have been done on SH5, but instead, they try to squeeze more money by converting a WW2 naval sim into an MMO, a genre which I never thought I'd associate with a sim.
Oh and it runs in Flash (game performance issues, anyone?). Definitely not the way to go, folks. We're not given access to source codes because they know for a fact that anything coming into the community's hands, returns as a kick-ass product loved by everyone without need for anything else, which means no new purchases, no business for them.
Finally, I couldn't miss the chance (now that I've noticed the previous posts; hi Dan
) to thank the devs again for doing all they could in taking the SH saga to a good place, too bad that money is the only thing that talks (besides the CEOs) at corporate management.
Cheers