as a member of the former 'mission team'... i have to echo pyra's concerns. i developped two missions almost to completion within the first month that the team was created, and then due to the limitations of the mission tool, was not able to test most of what i had 'written'. i had numerous questions answered by you, veriac, on msn, but still had many more (okay, so i probably was aiming to create much tougher missions than were needed, but that's because i like challenges).
anyway, because so many of us 'writers' were having problems with the tool, we basically gave up on finishing anything because it was such a hassle. we were willing to spend time creating missions, but we weren't willing to waste time redoing our work multiple times.
and to add to that, i believe at least one or two of the writers offered to help update the (or write a new) mission tool program. but their offer was declined, since the current tool made it easy to import the missions into testing and then into the game. though i can't help but think that people who offered to help rewrite the tool would be able to keep that quality in it.
so to summarize... if there is no effort to make a user-friendly program for us, i am in support of shutting down the mission writing. however, i would prefer it be updated, and then i'm sure that from the former 8 member team, we could have 10-20 missions submitted within the first month (based on the partial ones we have already started)... and then more on a regular basis as we were originally supposed to do. the two major updates i suggest are that the program doesn't randomly freeze or close or in some other way make us loose all our work since we've last saved, and that it would allow us to test our entire mission (and not have certain features that it doesn't support).
--jason
ps... d, the offer for mission creaters probably happened when you were taking your break from larki. and missedme, sorry, but you missed the option to join the team last year and missed the point of v's post.