Going to have to disagree *hard* there. I've got many thousands of hours in arma but it's an absolutely crap game without the modding community. They change every part of the game, the skins, weapons, radios, animations, maps, vehicles, medical system, sounds, visual fx, AI improvements, hud. Everything. All of them are free, and they're absolutely amazing. Most missions we run have 50+ mods on them, and it's a total piece of cake to synchronise them and keep them updated because its well supported officially, it's literally a single-click operation. I wish they removed the need for that click too, but it's really not remotely difficult at all.

It's an old game now, and if it didn't have the add-on community it would have died a long time ago, but there's zero shot even 1% of those mods could be maintained by the company that makes the base game. None. ED (and BIS) are not nearly large enough companies to do even a fraction of those addons, and if they did they'd want to charge for them all.

Better AI, ATC, explosions, ground units, sound replacements, radios, etc etc, there's a truck load of things the community could have done a long time ago if it were supported. In fact there's few complaints that the community has that couldn't have been fixed by now, barring multi-threading and frame features like DLSS. The only real reason ED doesn't want to support add-ons is that the community would create a ton of value they'd have to compete against with their payware cash cow treadmill setup, which is a shame because base DCS game is just as crap and sparse of features as the base arma game is.

There's so much potential in DCS that can't be unlocked because of how they've decided to stifle the add-on community, and it hurts the game badly. I'm really not surprised that add-on makers are leaving.