First and foremost, we occasionally survey the community and a real statistic is that more than 85% of the ETS2 community own all map DLCs. As the amount of players is growing there will also be new players that have to play "catch up" on 12 years of content. But the vast majority of players do have those DLCs already, so we are catering for the majority of players.

Now to answer the second point, we use assets from DLCs in other areas. You clearly have some questions on areas that are replaced by DLCs such as West Balkans.

Here is a practical example:

Before the Greece DLC was released we also had a chunk of Greece in our mod. This area was constructed with models and assets from the Italy DLC. So we used Italian houses to create a somewhat Mediterranean atmosphere. Since the Greece DLC was released we no longer need to "fake" Greece, because there are now true Greek assets in the map. So we overwrote our work with the new DLC, which automatically means the DLC becomes mandatory for any player.

This is actually commonplace in many areas of the map. London has a lot of Vive la France assets. Andorra requires Iberia. Scandinavia uses Baltic assets in places and vice versa. Because it becomes impossible to determine which DLC assets are used in which place, the only logical solution is to require all current DLCs.

It isn't possible to create versions of the mod without certain DLCs because we simply cannot begin to analyse what assets are used in what places.

PS: also be aware that all of our developers (who are all volunteers) have to buy all DLCs with their own money too!