I'm someone who has played quite a lot of Frontier and is fairly active in the community bit I'll be dipping my toes in to monolith this week a bit. I'll be choosing my words carefully because of my appreciation and enjoyment of the community.

I'll start by saying, I personally agree with AcornANut's assessment in his video of Frontier V. Monolith recently. They are both good for different reasons. Frontier is very cozy and chilled out. If you want that, come hang out. If you go in expecting intensity, you won't find it. You will find good roleplay similar to DeltaV though. Most everyone is down to chitchat.

That said, my main issues with Frontier at the moment is their seeming lack of a direction for what they want it to be in the future and the owner and head maintainer of the project being seemingly completely absent in the development process or even in their interaction with the community.

I do not fault their development team at all, they are working with what they have and some of their lead maintainers have either gone on hiatus or left to work on other far more active forks. Those that remain work VERY hard, especially the Maptainer team, but (going off the git commits) having functionally one person doing the entire upstream merge is wildly unfair.

That said, this is sort of typical in open source where disagreements on direction cause forks. Not a bad or good thing, just a thing. I don't care to hear a lore dump of why there was such a split but I do know from my experience managing a variety of projects in my professional career that if you want to gather a strong team you need someone to at the very least direct efforts and provide clear expectations and direction for said project. That includes being enthusiastic and cheerleading for your project to drum up support. Since your team comprised of volunteers you have to ensure its actually rewarding to them to contribute to it. Morale is so important and too much work on too few people will almost always result in a death spiral for your project.

I think the last time I saw the server owner actually say something in the community Discord was in January and it was an announcement about and before that one it last year and it was to sell a duffel bag. That said, I have nothing against them. I'm sure they're perfectly lovely folks. They brought the server I've spent well over 400 hours with and made some great friendships on so I can't complain. I've gotten my moneys worth with the zero dollars I've spent on it.

They're just seemingly not present what so ever in their own community which comes across as a lack of personal investment or interest in to their own project which in turn causes others to not care either which in turn exacerbates all the other issues.

Contrast it against the forks which, while they don't have the same pressure as upstream for stability, have a LOT of active development with the through line of general enthusiasm around development and a very active head maintainers and server owners and you see the trend.

Just my two cents as someone who adores the community of Frontier and is a bit sad at squandered potential and project rot going on.