I was inactive for the entire 3.0 development/release/trial, so I can't comment directly on what went on there. But I want to give a perspective on LW's codebase.
I just did a quick line count of LW's code, and it came out to just over 50,000 lines. When you're on the server and your friends just disconnected and you're starting to be bored, it might not seem like there are a lot of things going on... but there are. A developer attempting to recreate LW's from scratch would be faced with all of them. You might think, oh, LW's is easy, let's just make some gangs and some banking and we're done, shouldn't be too hard, right? But no, then you remember the races, and the hunting, and the admin system, and the anti-hacking measures, and the dueling, and the vehicle set, and the IRC echo... Generally these features are not hard to implement individually, but when you consider all of them together the list becomes very intimidating.
It is not at all surprising to me that LW 3.0 was lacking in features, considering the above. Rewriting LW's from scratch would be an
enormous undertaking. That's not to say it can't be done, but I estimate it would take me several months to do it, up to half a year, while working on nothing else significant. That's a huge amount of time for a project that that doesn't, and will never, pay. I'm sure the 3.0 developers tried their best to reimplement the most important of LW's features, but there are just so many that even that seemed bare-bones.
Now add to the sheer volume of code the fact that all of the code is built on a system, GTA:SA, that was never designed for it, and the task becomes even harder. You can take something that seems like a good idea, for example keeping track of the cash on the server side, but then the system makes it impossible because it turns out that clients can do so many things (gambling, pay-n-spray) that are not synced with the server.
So, with that in mind, instead of getting rid of the current codebase and starting over, my strategy since I've been developing LW's has been to try to find relatively easy-to-implement features and changes that nevertheless have the potential to make a difference to gameplay---in other words, changes that seem to have a high payoff to work ratio. The hunting system, the events, and now the
persistent gangs that I'm working on are all examples of additions that seemed that way to me when I was making them. While the current codebase may not be perfect, I do my best to work with it, because rewriting it is not feasible at this point.
