You are equating people who modify their own game with mods released to the general public. They are not the same.
If someone is advanced in the mechanism of the game, then they have the ability to tweak individual settings to their own liking. And that is a good thing. It does mean that your game is like no one else's, but you know that and are looking for certain results from the tweaking.
But most people don't spend the time or have the desire to dissect the game to find out how to tweak it themselves. Instead they download mods to do that. When they load up TMO they expect to play the game as Ducimus designed it. And when Joe's Whizzbang Realistic Crew Rack mod is added to TMO and it is specifically touted as "compatible" these users have some assumptions about what "compatible" means.
- It means that the Whizzbang Realistic Crew Rack mod changes the racks to be "more realistic."
- It means also that other game settings are not changed. The sub doesn't change appearance outside the realistic racks. The gameplay is unchanged. The enemy AI is unchanged. The torpedos are unchanged. And so on. They tell everyone they are playing TMO and that actually means something.
- It simply means that "Whizzbang Realistic Crew Rack" mod honestly tells the entirety of the mod's function.
Now, I'm not versed on ALL the RSRDC changes to the game. But it DOES materially change the TMO AI settings. All crews on enemy shipping, both merchant and warship, are changed. The numbers of enemy planes are severely nerfed. Those planes can no longer see you at periscope depth and sometimes even below to bomb you. Enemy detection of your submarine is changed.
Given the above and other changes which are present but I can't at present state with 100% accuracy, Is the player still playing TMO? No. They are playing RSRDC. They may enjoy RSRDC but they tell everyone they play TMO.
It's a question of honesty. There are supermods and there are single purpose mods. When your mod says it's a campaign mod, that's what it should do: change the configuration of enemy shipping in the game. It should not change enemy AI, your torpedoes, your detection effectiveness, your crush depth, periscope characteristice, sub skins, behavior of enemy planes, or anything else but enemy shipping.
If you want to do all that then your mod is a supermod. It should be released that way. I don't even think there's a problem of listing TMO as a dependency, as Traveller's Mod does. It makes clear that it is a difficulty supermod to be layered on top of TMO. That is honest.
The word "compatible" to normal Joe Public does not mean "changes all aspects of TMO and oh yeah, the game won't crash when you use them in combination." To Joe Public it means (and should actually be) "makes the change claimed in the mod title but otherwise I'm playing TMO."
That's why although my game has a modified CapnScurvy's Optical Targeting Correction mod, removing all the recognition manual changes, I'm not going to release a version of OTC that removes that. That's CapnScurvy's mod and he has the right to decide what's in it. CapnScurvy's readme EULA is much like mine and gives users the right to do what they want with, and I arguably would be within his permission to release a modified version of OTC, but out of common decency and a respect for a much better modder than myself, I believe it would be wrong to do that.
TMO is Ducimus' mod and he has the right to decide what's in it. I won't release any modifications to TMO and I won't release any modifications to OTC for the same reason. If you respect modders and you want them to continue staying around to make more mods you don't disrespect them by invading their territory. Removing authorship from their work is the surest way to make them feel unappreciated. If you work for a large corporation you know all about that.
Respecting modders' territory with other mods is essential to maintaining the sense of community we have around here. Nobody was more vocal about maintaining that other mods were not compatible with his mod than Lurker.
At the time I believed that he applied the same standards to himself, but his mod was not comaptible with TMO by the same definition he used to disqualify other mods from compatibility with his.