Respectfully, I think that it would cause problems if World Hub airports were optional:
- You can expect that the next round of airports being released in mid-May is going to be in the hundreds. There were a lot submitted in this round. And we’re still in the alpha. That could make for a very clumsy opt-in process.
- I’ve put somewhere around 300 hours into developing World Hub airports since the World Hub alpha began. If I thought that my airports would be seen by three people who knew that these airports were available, from the hundreds available, and decided to use them, there is no way I would be putting in so much time and effort. And that would probably be the case for many people. My motivation, as a World Hub developer, is to improve the sim for everybody.
- Third, and probably most importantly, if World Hub airports fork off of the generic base airports, there would then be a question on process when the world team (made up of Gaya and Orbx and perhaps others) edits an airport. Do they edit the base one, and forget about all of the changes made in the World Hub, or do they edit the World Hub version, which potentially nobody has opted into?
I’m not 100% happy with the World Hub so far, and in fact, I’ve stated my intentions to only do a few more airports and then stop participating in the alpha because of this concern I have raised. I’m afraid that my changes are going to get blown away in August or September, and I have yet to hear from anyone assuring me that everything will be okay. I’m also concerned about this automatic flattening thing, and what happens when somebody edits Courchevel, or Saba, or St. Barths, or Lukla, etc. I won’t touch them, but it’s likely that somebody else will in the future, and then we might have a flattened airport.
But overall, I still think that the World Hub is a net positive. The development team has yet to edit the biggest airport in the world (I’m looking at you, LTFM) despite hundreds of votes and pleading from the community. They haven’t touched Tocumen airport in Panama, despite 118 votes and a wish logged two weeks after launch. They didn’t touch KBWI for two USA world updates, despite a logged bug in their bug tracker and 47 votes. The World Hub is the only tool we have to fix some of these things ourselves.