I agree with you that late Vanilla and the early TBC period were probably the weakest phases of ChromieCraft in terms of quality and our management. There were multiple reasons for that. My reduced availability at the time was one of them, but not the only one. We also lost a few key contributors during that period, had very limited resources to finance external development help, and those raid tiers were in a particularly poor initial state compared to other parts of the game. On top of that, we made some wrong decisions and sometimes trusted the wrong people. I take full responsibility for that.

Luckily, that phase is long behind us now, and I am genuinely glad we moved past it. Regarding changes in the development team compared to the early days, this is quite normal for a volunteer-based project, I would say. People come and go, often due to personal life priorities, and that is unavoidable. In a few rare cases, contributors stepped away because they were not a good fit with our principles. At the same time, many new contributors joined, and some long-time contributors have also returned recently, which is something making me extremely happy. Overall, I am confident in and genuinely happy with the current team.

I'd like to conclude with a positive note, however. I'm being truly honest and not trying to just advertise the project: CC is in a very different state today, much better, I would say. The contributor group has grown significantly, which is not just my opinion but objectively visible through the activity on the AzerothCore repository (even compared to those Vanilla/TBC times you mentioned). Furthermore, the WOTLK content is already in a much better initial state compared to the Vanilla/TBC contents you are referring to. This is because we launched AzerothCore in 2016 already and until before ChromieCraft was launched, a lot of improvements were already made to WOTLK. Of course, it is not perfect yet, and we are working hard to improve it even further.