this is actually the 10th year of OpenRA - development ... (started in the middle of 2007) !
i feel the same, and i understand their need for a break after a (another) exhausting year. The last couple of days i was pretty much forced to think about the development of openra in 2016 ... since i volunteered to make the new-years-newspost ..
i actually didnt PR the text since i didnt feel i did it good enough nor catched everything important to say but this is what i got :
2016 ... what a great year for OpenRA !
Tons of Ore, Tiberium and Spice did get harvested ... an uncountable number of battles on tempered, snowy and deserted fields have been held.
Despite having only a handfull of Developers at all time, i think 2016 was a productive year and OpenRA made considerable progress thanks to a couple of relentless programmers who keep plumbing on this Open-Source-Engine by spending most of their free time doing the sisyphos-work of solving our tickets.
I think it's important to be aware of the fact that without this skilled group of people our engine would stay still and nobody would listen to our suggestions and complaints and then work on possible solutions.
Especially this year i've noticed the OpenRA-community did get more involved into the developing ... sleipnir-threads with polls popping up like mushrooms, the community is discussing more then ever all kinds of issues. On the other hand, our developers try to please the biggest chunk of the community with equal ideas by letting suggestions and contributions influence the development.
This is not always as easy as it reads here because some people seem to have a hard time lowering their own needs or accepting ideas from other community-members which can get quite exhausting for the developers. And we really dont want to scare off the few programmers we have.
I dont know about you guys, but for 2017 i will try and create a better environment for you, the players, modders, contributers and developers of OpenRA by showing friendliness, my respect and interest, read your ideas, upvote your dedication and effort and reward your work with a thank you.
I do that all for free and in my spare time ... all i ask for is to do the same ... how does that sound ?
and on a more personally note, after all the years i have spent on openra (99% shenanigans and playing on the engine) i would follow paul, lukas and oliver to whatever they are doing next (projects, games ... ) even if that means that they turn their back on OpenRA.