This actually hurt to read. Not the cringe but how the old writers truly did love their craft. Research it. Add it in. All cause Glenn was an unwholesome Republican who was too corrupt IRL so we could not have him in TNO. Removed, verboten. Like legit this is kinda depressing how the guy's hard work got wiped cause of some new jannies.
Honestly, Glenn's flaws make for a potentially more interesting Glenn to have in TNO. If that's really why Glenn is gone, then that's a massive indictment on TNO and proves that TNO's writing sucks not because it is somehow impossible to have good writing in a HOI4 mod, but because TNO's writing is morally cartoonish and simplistic despite its ostensible message.
I think the point about the new TNO devs not liking their work or the world is valid. Since the new guard took over from the lead dev-driven model (Panzer/Pacifica), the mod has spiralled further and further into self-hatred. The dev team spends weeks upon weeks, and later months and even years pouring over all of the mod's faults. Over how the mod is horrible and is deeply flawed like a body dysmorphic looking at his body in the mirror, complaining to himself about how he is too fat, his penis isn't long enough, his nails are too long, his hair is the wrong colour, his shoulders aren't broad enough... Similairly, Moskowien has been reworked a copious amount of times, the entire map was taken out and replaced, Atlantropa was filled back in with water, the Africa setup is about to be OTLified, there is a massive ground-up proposal to completely change American politics in its entirety...
On this thread, we've seen a view into the development process of modern TNO in a way the average r/TNOmod user and the average TNO player has likely not. The TNO development process in 2025 is much more focused on criticism rather than creation. I honestly do like some of the concepts that come from the modern TNO drawing board (new Africa and ngl VotePig also goes here), this comes with the knowledge that none of it will actually get put into the mod. Africa's skeleton will get switched out, probably by the end of the year, but the actual content probably won't be integrated because it will never get fixed. For all of the comedy inherent to the fact that most new TNO content after 2021 is from submods, we also should take note that despite Cold Southern Springs being one of the most impactful, promising and flourishing TNO submod communities in its heyday during its era as a submod and being able to release 2 years of Brazil content relatively fast, development on South America has essentially stalled entirely following integration. Brazil's content remained essentially unchanged for years, and was extended until 1970 for 2 of Brazil's multiple paths just recently. With this kind of pace, we might get Argentina content by the time Hearts of Iron V rolls around if we're lucky. In a twisted way, integration is the worst thing that can happen to a TNO submods as evidenced by the Chinese community and 2WRW.
I think it's pretty clear that TNO's internal culture is to blame for TNO's current stagnation. The process to get a proposal for a country accepted is so overbearing that any kind of interaction between two countries has to be cleared with different team leads and any kind of difficulty (or an opportunity for constructing a better and more interesting experience) will lead to that content getting rolled back. This is the reason that Göring and Atlantropa were removed. Other team leads were unwilling to make content that would deal with Göring invading their countries to the point that they opted to remove Göring and everyone involved with the Mediterranean was unwilling to deviate from making wikiscrapes to the point that when Atlantropa presented them with an environment where wikiscraping was impossible, they opted to remove Atlantropa. Wikiscraping also involves more than pure laziness, it involves cowardice - VotePig involves bringing back the New Deal because they don't want to explore how USA would look without it. I remember words to this exact effect in the VotePig proposal.
There's nothing wrong with being thorough and thinking through what you're making. Reworks are probably a good thing for most mods, like for KR4 where they can bring the content of a country/region up to par with newer content (it'd be weird for Guatemala to have better content than Germany, right?), but TNO's approach to reworks are not that. They don't have so much to do with making better content (the concepts might even be better, not making a statement about if new Moskowien is better than old Moskowien) but more to do with "fixing" TNO. The new leadership sees TNO as a problematic child that should have its tumours removed and gangrenous limbs amputated rather than something to build on top of. TNO is led currently by people like Wilhelm Keitel. Keitel, as Göring put it, had "a sergeant's mind inside a field marshal's body." These were people who were industrious enough under Panzer or Pacifica, but who were unable to actually lead the mod. They decided to kill the entire mod not by perfectionism, but by committee. These people were always problematic on a personal level - I don't think anyone on HOI4 outside of the TNO leadership gaggle has had a positive interaction with Mango or Lamounier, for example.
TNO's devs are not lazy. I believe that they are industrious and able to actually put out the updates they want to. I believe the fault is in their leadership - the wrong people are in change and are running things the wrong way. This is because they are thinking about the mod in the wrong way. Whenever an update gets closer, new faults are found and have to be ironed out, setting work back to square one. It'd be like Sisyphus pushing his boulder up that hill, but Sisyphus didn't stop rolling and set the boulder back on the foot of the hill because the way he rolled the boulder up before was too sympathetic to 1960s liberal Republicans.
