If there is one thing which I consider a major weidu flaw it would be weidu auto-overwrite design. I cannot stress enough how irrational it looks to me, compared to every other SDK's.
Let's look at the historical example:
- when Westley Weimer stopped weidu developing, Valerio Bigiani, AKA The Bigg took his place
- new weidu versions above 185 have changed the way how regexp works
- to this day, some modders refuse/forbidden to use new weidu versions because of the changed behavior and even if they did it because they are lazy, they still did it
- yet, many players will extract more than one single mod into game directory and weidu will overwrite old version of the setup-mod.exe > mod code won't be processed exactly as the author wanted
- this might lead to inconsistency between the state of the game which player has vs state of the game which mod author expects
this might look like not so important problem, but there is recent example: weidu 241 break EET and BWS at the worst time when it might happen - when EET in on hold and BWS is out of support. How mod authors can work with a framework/sdk which has a chance to break their mods in the future?
But all of this aren't even the main reasons to abandon auto-overwrite update. I believe it's the basic design principals of how to create stable and consistent system/framework/sdk.
How is even possible to have consistency when:
OCalm might change
weidu code can change
game itself might change
Combine it all and you have huge probability to have inconsistent installation of the same mods but for the different time because the weidu version which was used to create and release mod is not the last one. When you have one simple mod, it might work for 10 years but EE have some very complicated mods like T&B/F&P.
Also when you have 100+ mods, removing auto-overwrite design
can have positive impact at uninstallation consistency. Mods will be installed and uninstalled using exactly the same version which was used by author at the time of their creation.
Wisp, by putting huge effort into testing and code regression testing, you have saved modders community from some major breaking changes disaster. But at the same time, taking care about "does changing one single byte can cause old mods to breakup?" is major drawback of the improvements.
When you abandon this auto-overwrite scheme, you will be free to do everything you always wanted. You can introduce breaking changes without caring about 10+ years of the historic past. And that might be biggest impact for weidu progress. You cannot have progress without changes.
tl;dr: weidu should not auto-update itself, allowing mods to be installed using always the same version of the weidu. Also it will allow for breaking changes/improvements but changes will not affect the previous mods