Oh look, here's somewhere I can contribute instead of just lurking aimlessly without knowing what is going on.
TommieV, you're not really accurate on which way the gratitude goes. Here's how modding really works: If SF were to die now, then in ten minutes time you'd all be playing CS, DoD, TFC, BF2, or whatever. Mods are fleeting and fans are fickle. A happy, active, community is what satisfies a mod developer and drives them to continue improving their product. However, the developer has a responsibility to continue to improve the product in a timely fashion, something which in this respect is not happening. The SF community is failing as a result of general dissatisfaction with the current development team (and if this dissatisfaction did not exist then I don't think the leakers would have been received nearly as well as they have been).
The unspoken agreement between a development team and a community would be something like this: You keep us satisfied, we'll keep supporting you. We'll give you that nice buzz you get when you read "wow that's great" in response to a screenshot of your map, we'll keep posting topics just to say thank you, and we'll keep playing - but you need to continue to improve the product, and you need to listen to us, because we know what we want. The gratitude you are talking about needs to move in both directions - a community is as essential for an amateur game as the development team is. Without it, there is little motivation.
This agreement was broken by the current development team. The community is unsettled and rowdy because they can sense the lack of direction and cohesion within the development team, but most importantly because they are not getting what they need: the product that works. Now, you can say that the leaked build is unfinished alpha and so on, but that doesn't concern me. What concerns me is that it's been two years now since I first started writing that code, and six months since the release of v1.9.2, and that the build is still in that unfinished state. The current team is still making mistakes that I made and learnt from either before I started on SF, or in the first month (I can't remember when you first joined, but if you were around for v1.4.2, you'll remember that I initially wanted to jump to v2.0.0, and soon realised it would be unrealistic).
SF v1.9.2 has teething problems, and instead of fixing them, we are seeing work on new gamemodes, arbitrary peripherals (in this case, perhaps not even work on SourceForts, I'm still finding facts here), and so on - features which are quite frankly way off the priority list. I wish it were as simple as "the develpoment team is trying to accomplish too much in one version", but it's not: I don't believe they even have a clear idea of what they want to accomplish - you can see how much they disagree with each other in public - and this is a good reason for Tony's post on locking down the forums to sort out their public image.
SourceForts has survived for too long on the (initially deserved) gratitude of its community. The time has come for the development team to hold up their end of the bargain, but they don't have anything to deliver to sate your hunger. Unfortunately, there is no-one on the team with both the courage and the internal respect to take the project where it needs to be.
On a marginal side note, perhaps Holy_Devil is unthankful to the current development team because they haven't actually delivered much in all the time they've been working? Just an observation.