The entire community coalescing around a single engine is ultimately a good thing; there's still room for the maverick outliers, but so long as you do-what-Quakespasm-does you'll get support for pretty much anything released.

The obvious con is that the quirks and idiosyncracies of that single engine become enshrined as part of a standard. That can cause harm - e.g. FitzQuake and earlier versions of Quakespasm had very poor performance with dynamic lights. That can hold back content authors from using dynamic lights, and at one point led to the ridiculous situation where disabling multitexture was touted as a performance tweak.

Fortunately Quakespasm these days is really rather good. 

Regardless of the largely unfounded criticism for Arcane, it has done a lot to reignite interest in this game, arguably alongside some other big releases like Orl's Ter Shib and jam9. On the mapping side, Trenchbroom 2 and dumptruck's tutorials have done wonders in terms of drawing in new mappers. They even got community veterans to finally map after 20 years.

I don't know if the scene is better than ever because I don't know what it was like before. It still seems quite niche to me but it's also doing considerably better than most other classics out there. The number of mappers who turn everything that they touch to gold is still quite small. I'm worried that when they retire, there won't be many people to carry the torch. Many of them already seldom post here or elsewhere.

On the other hand, this has resulted in mappers whom I greatly admire being more accessible. I've gotten tons of advice and insights directly from mappers whom I aspire to match in skill even if only in the smallest capacity.

Targeting a single engine is not a good thing. There are still a bunch of source ports that are actively maintained, and the devs each have different goals. Some of those goals might align with more with specific users. Even if most people are using Quakespasm, there are still a great many who might prefer using Mark V, QSS, Qrack, FTE, and others. There should be some effort made towards supporting multiple ports to a reasonable extent, and there are more reasons in addition to users simply preferring the features of one port over another. 

 

 

AND TOOLS!