To Adam specifically: you are incredibly emotionally invested in this right now and I think that is making it hard for you to look at any of these issues in an unbiased way.
Are you for serious? I don't understand how you can possibly know what's going on for me emotionally right now? I don't know where this comes from.
If I had to guess, he's basing the conclusion off the very long and passionate posts you have on the subject, the very defensive reactions you've had to posters in this and other threads, etc. This isn't an insult or a way to suggest your feelings on the topic aren't valid / "correct" / whatever - just a recognition that you really love Dominion and have a strong emotional investment in the subject that may impact how you communicate with others. Many of us do. I do, SCSN does, you do, probably we all do.
Calling it like I see it - SCSN can be a bit of an abrasive dick sometimes but it really seemed like throughout this entire thread he wasn't trying to be the least bit hostile about anything, and you still spent a lot of time arguing with him. Based on how you've interacted in the past this may / may not be warranted, I'm not going to judge all that, but that to me indicated there was more at play for you than a cold and calculated reading of the facts of the situation. We all have some degree of emotional investment in this game which drives us to rationalize feelings we already had about it ("MF sucks at programming" being validated by decompiled source code or "FDS doesn't do anything but complain" being validated by FDS threads or what have you).
This paragraph gets kinda out there, just a heads up. One of the hardest things for highly intelligent / "nerdy" people to do (really everyone) is to separate emotional thought processes from purely logical ones. There really aren't purely logical thoughts - humans use their emotional spaces to help sort through complex problems that would be less efficient to purely logically parse. Happens all the time without you even necessarily realizing it. I don't really think anyone is truly good at purely logical thoughts separate from emotion - I think we're all just logic emulators running on emotional processors if you will. So what I'm saying, is that anyone with a strong emotional investment in anything is bound to reach conclusions that others with strong emotional investments won't necessarily reach, and that part of finding common ground is to recognize one's own state and try to deescalate the situation for everyone.
3) Despite the fact that there has been unwarranted hostility towards Making Fun on these forums, there has also been some pretty nasty behavior back on the part of Making Fun toward us, particularly from DavidtheDavid.
So isn't David not actually an employee of MF? Didn't I hear that somewhere? In any case, I don't read what he's saying as condescending. I'm not sure how you can, but maybe you can. OK. I don't know what to say to you.
To be perfectly honest, "David isn't an MF employee" might be one of the bigger cognitive backflips I've heard anyone make to defend MF. He explicitly joined this forum in order to collect comments and pass them on to developers; this was his stated intention for posting here and making threads. His user title on this forum is "Dominion Online Staff" and he is an admin on the MF forums Regardless of where he is on the payroll, he's acting as an agent and public representative of MF, very obviously so, and his actions reflect on the organization he represents.
If you don't see how some of his posts have been really, really condescending, I also don't know what to tell you. I'm suspecting they just aren't coming to mind for you - he's made a lot of pretty good posts here too before he left and I think he got a lot of unnecessary flak for doing a very hard job. But dig through his post history, and try to see how they could come across to people whom have been playing 2.0 for months and making these suggestions through numerous channels while seemingly being ignored. Being told "hey dude it's an alpha buddy!!! of course it doesn't work!!!" in response to someone obviously distraught that they suddenly have no way to play a game they paid $60 for, that's really condescending, no way around that.
As for the animations, I've been told that they make it easier to figure out what's going on while watching a stream. I was told by F.DS people to make my animation speed Very Fast on Goko, and I was told by every other viewer who told me when I asked that they would prefer slower animations so they could follow the action better. So I compromised and put them on Fast.
Animations on Goko and animations on MF being totally different things - animations on Goko show people cards and where they are going. Animations on MF do a lot more than that, and these are for the most part the animations people were complaining about. Most people seemed like they would have been satisfied by "Goko animations but Salvager fast", which took until 2.0.42.1 to happen. In the mean time, more of the glittery unnecessary animations were added, so you can see how this frustrated players a lot.