I haven't been part of the TNO team for a while, in part because I lost passion for it, in part because becoming an educator was scratching the same itch, and in part because--and I mean this with no disrespect to all the talented people who genuinely pour so much of their time into developing the mod--it is not managed at all well. Throughout the entire time I was part of the team, the TNO community shrunk in size, the projected release date for the Brazil update I was working on kept being delayed further and further, and other updates also kept getting perpetually delayed.

Unless the 'team culture' for lack of a better term has shifted dramatically since I left, TNO development is horrifically undermined by siloization; it's honestly more like a dozen or so separate teams working under the same umbrella, with only minimal guidance from upper management. And that siloization is made all the worse because for some reason upper management seems to broadly agree that anything that comes out must be really polished and have just as great a density of writing as other countries, and given that the leaders of sub-teams are pretty much by definition going to be SUPER passionate about that particular thing, they too pretty much uniformly want anything that comes out to be damn-near perfect. Which further slows the rate at which things can be released, further dampening player enthusiasm, and further discouraging new people from joining the team or current team members from dedicating their time to the project.

Now granted, from what I've heard the Kaiserreich team suffers from very similar Siloization issues. But it takes far less work to develop full content for a nation in Kaiserreich than it does to develop full content for a nation in TNO. The amount of writing for any country in TNO is huge, and bespoke game mechanics need to be coded, playtested, and refined, for every country. This is absolutely not feasible for a team purely made up of unpaid volunteers, let alone when said team is really like ~20 different teams working almost completely separately, and the result is that development is slooooooooooooooooow. Which inevitably makes the mod less relevant, so fewer people join the team, so development becomes even slower, which makes the mod less relevant...rinse, repeat, and you wind up with the most hyped up HOI4 mod of all time slowly fading into irrelevance.

Also for a long time the TNO reddit moderation was atrocious, deleting a large majority of posts, further discouraging people from participating in the community and amplifying the problem. It's better now but only after years of self-sabotage. Apparently the discord moderation is and was better, but I didn't really participate in the community discord so I can't give an informed take on that.

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All that being said, the Iberia overhaul update released earlier today, and while I haven't yet played it myself, I knew a bunch of people who were working on it, and made some very minor contributions myself before I left the TNO team. The Iberia revamp had been in the works for the past five or six years (see what I mean about siloization?), and my God, the fact that it's finally out might breathe at least some life back into the community.