What do you mean “call things for what they are”?
It’s a weak play to come into the thread and call the project “cursed” after the lead announced he doesn’t want to work on it anymore. It’s rude.
It’s a hobby project – this is not the same as a commercial project getting stuck in development hell or flopping after release. This is a fanwork that people work on in their free time, ideally for their own enjoyment. It sounds like Zim is short on both, so can’t blame them for not wanting to work on this anymore after porting twice and being in development as long as it has been. We all change. Our priorities change, too.
I canceled my own project before so I get that it’s a tough call to make and come to terms that you don’t want to work on it anymore. Does it stink? Yeah it’s never fun, but criticizing them over it isn’t productive.
Separately – some thoughts on SoA:
My gut is that although it’s unfortunate SoA will not be [complete], it’s still a pretty significant part of hacking history and should be remembered as such. It was one of the first projects to be made in FE8 and use skills (even custom ones). It broke unit design conventions in subtle ways at a time where this wasn’t common. If you play the FE8 version (which is how I remember the game), you’ll def be able to see it as a bridge between the old and new in the hacking community.
I don’t even need to address visuals.
I think anyone who got into hacking around the time where FE8 hacking was starting to really take off in 2017/18 would probbably consider SoA an influence in some way, even if there are parts of it that they don’t enjoy. It certainly was a touchstone for me when working on VQ back in the day.