As I have stated many times before, these issues should be a thing of the past soon and no longer a concern, so there isn't really much need to get too worked up about it.
Paranoia (if you want to call it that) works both ways. Just as we may be concerned about giving out Login Servers to anyone who wishes to have them, you are Paranoid about the Login Server being a single point of failure and have little faith that one could be created that would have very minimal downtime.
The fact is that the current official Login Server could not be distributed in any way for multiple reasons, one being that the creator of it specified not too and we are legally bound by that decision. Other Login Server options are starting to pop up and I wouldn't be surprised if we see 1 or 2 more options in the near future. What is done with them is up to their creators. I believe the only one being worked on by an actual EQEmu team member is the one that WildcardX is currently working on. I don't have the details of the plans he has to use that for yet though.
Really, EQEmu can't easily be compared to some of the other emulators, because we have a unique setup that works well for our needs, or at least will once the LS stuff is all back in working order again. To even compare any of the multiple WoW Emulators to this project is just wrong lol. Not only does WoW have a hundred times more players than EQ, but they also have at least 3 separate major emulator projects all doing their own thing. With a huge community like that, sure, they can do things differently and still do OK. Personally, the main reason I won't even consider running a WoW emulator server is due to the community as a whole. They are split between their multiple projects and each server is split due to their private Login Server system as well. So, you have servers advertising everywhere if they want to maintain any sort of decent player-base. You also have no one easy place to go to even get started. If you are a player, it is a bit overwhelming trying to find a decent server to play on and can take quite a while of searching around the net to even get information on various servers. If you are an admin, you have to first pick which emulator version you want to use, and then which database you want to use and so on. I imagine there is probably some setup that is better than most to get you started off, but from all of the searching I did, I found no clear answer as to which one that would be. Not to mention having to find one that has decent tools made for creating content. I didn't personally see any special tools like what we have for EQEmu when I was searching around about the WoW Emulators.
SWG and EQ2Emu are both in development, so it is hard to really compare them to EQEmu as well IMO.
We have a very limited player-base that probably maxes out around 1000 or so total players throughout a 24 hour period, which would probably only be over the weekend. That doesn't leave much play room to be forking. If you cut those numbers in half by forking the project, it would quickly get to a point where people would have a hard time finding a group/raid and get bored and quit. The more that numbers dwindle, it would be likely to start a snowball effect causing the project to basically be abandoned completely. I think that should be avoided at all costs. Call that paranoia, but when dealing with dividing up an already relatively low population project, I think you are just asking for the worst.
Hopefully something can be worked out to give us a backup option anyway. But, forking is not a good solution IMO.
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