About the whole "if anyone, blame Activision" ideas - I would have to disagree, to a point.

They were the people who gave CA an extra YEAR in developement to make the game Awesome with almost everything implimented that they could. Heck, there's still things that they only got around to partially impliment but put in anyway because they know the mod community is so great. These things are the code which someone at TWC found for a Blood Mod - code which just needs to be "unlocked" to have it work. In my mind this is an amazing thing on CA's side as it makes it that the game can have blood, but it also makes it so that it needs to be modded in and won't stunt their sales by giving the game a Mature rating. There are also things like the Reflections mod which unlocks yet another piece of code which CA didn't impliment. It seems this one was left out because it doesn't work with some graphics cards, but when it does - WOW CA wanted this game to be amazing and it shows - I think we can cut them some slack right now. I've been pissed off from a number of bugs and oversights - but overall I can sidestep them and pretend they dont' exist for the moment; it isn't easy, but it's possible.

My point is that CA and Activision deffinately know that the game has problems and are well on their way to fixing them. All games and software now adays has patches and whatnot to make it run perfectly (and even then it isn't so). I agree that it's frusterating when a game loses some things as it evolves but hopefully we can adapt to those things or mod them to our likings.