Yo, looks like im late to the party.
There seems to be only positive voices about the Community Edition, and the ones complaining are missing. So let me picture for you what it might look like on the other side.
First of all you have to realise that modders and players are fundamentally different.
Players are people who are currently trying to grasp the concept of the game, and have much difficulties doing so.
Modders are people who already grasped the game well enough and are running out of content. So they make more content, because they enjoy it so much.
Introducing more mechanics and content ontop of a player just convolutes and confuses him, hence the saying "Why do I need this ?". And it is a good argument. We all started running in baby shoes to get where we are today.
I only started to use other peoples modding content once I felt comfortable enough with the game, and had my fair share of experience with the base game. I moved up once I "understod" the game, some people never reach that level of understanding.
Secondly, Community Editions are always bad and FECAL MATTER! on. And for a good reason. Take a look at this development chart.
Community Editions are usually the first step in a full game development cycle. Thus they feel the least polished experience of them all. And people are right, because thats exactly the case.
People dont like the CP, but praise Enhanced Edition, without realising that one is just further along than the other. But their judgement, as plebeian as it is, is not wrong.
One of the things in my oppinion which went horribly is that the CP didnt distinguish between Code and Content, and thus mixed both together. A horrible mistake. While it is impossible to completely seperate Code and Content, a better effort could have been made to distinguish between the two. Something I am still requesting should be made.
A direct impact of this is that the CP flooded the spawnable items in an almost vulgar manner. If I know that if I play 72 hours of a game, and wont be able to complete a single set than something went horribly wrong. Drop Tiers get mixed up, unique items with garbage stats spawn, and regular items are more powerful than unique ones. All of this was the consequence of the unhalted "restoration" of developer items, which were clearly unfinished, and unimplemented. Critique of the well designed vanilla progression getting destroyed by CP wasnt made without reason. A well desinged split between content, and code could have minimised that kind of repercussion.
In my oppinion this is also the biggest gap that modders and players would need to fix in order to move forward. I have high hopes that bigger mods and modders would one day make a well designed rebalance and spawning of all items currently in the game, but it will be night to impossible to do this for 2 - 3 people. For such things you need dedicated testers, and a mass of players to rebalance your game. Most mods never make a full development cycle, because the mass of users are missing to kickstart the process, in order to aquire more users, which test your game even more, etc ... .
So for this reasons I think it would be a good idea to split the CM Patch into a code and content part.
And since so many CP people are here, does anybody know if the CP installer does anything else outside of the Sacred 2 Gold folder ? If not, we could simply start to synthesize the parts we need.
But meh, what do I know ;).