Great journal article Defrag, very well thought out and I agree with what you said completely. At least the FF team can take comfort in having the backing of the 'old skool' TFC community and from what I see, a number of other fortress mods.
An additional concern of mine is that the majority of people won't be hit by the 'wow factor' - as I was when TFC first came out. When I first started playing, the whole 'multiplayer' thing was really still its infancy, and people would play against other real people for weeks, no matter how steep the learning curve (or however bad the game was).
Anyways, gg wp!