Presumably, the Devs already have tools to convert between BIN and TXT formats, and I think it would be great if those tools were released to the modding community...not asking for anything fancy yet (like Galaxy/Particle Forge), just the ConvertData that I would think already exists in a working form...

To an extent, I can understand why the Devs may be unwillingly to do this...if people have access to the entity files and what not, then they could try and port over "Rebellion content" (like ability ideas) to Diplomacy...but much of the new content cannot be ported over...

No matter how creative a modder is, they can't take the unique Titan armor/weapon type, or the new class of corvettes, or the new entity modifiers, etc. and put it in Diplomacy....furthermore, the things that can be ported over (like the textures, certain conceptual ideas, and some of the particle effects) aren't safeguarded to begin with...

I feel doing so would not only be nice for the community, but would be in the developers' best interest...Rebellion clearly has a host of problems (and of course it would, it's only the first Beta after all!), and there's been a lot of feedback about what's wrong with this current version...

Unfortunately, simply knowing what's bad doesn't necessarily tell you what's good...for example, a lot of people think Titans are too powerful, so clearly we have a problem...but what is a good solution?  There are a whole host of things one could do to change this (reduce the DPS, weaken the abilities, put them later in the tech tree, make them more expensive, make them level up faster/slower, etc.), but it would take a ton of theorizing and play testing to determine the best set of changes...without modding capabilities we, as a community, can do nothing but sit on our heels and wait for the next Beta (which's "improvements" may not even be for the better)...

The community has the time and the manpower to implement many changes and quickly test them...the Devs, I'd think, simply don't...as such, I feel that by allowing modders to try out balancing of their own, the Devs will get higher quality feedback that will accelerate their move to a more polished product...I'd rather give feedback like "Moving Titans higher in the tech tree seems to solve the problem" than simply "TITANS ARE OP...RARRR"...