Oh boy time for another writeup about a subject I'm very familiar with.

ZDoom's been a disaster for a while. The dev team changed a while back, and with it, the focus. Ironically, the originally lead dev who finally retired was a tranny, but kept it very personal. The current leads are one hyper-autistic German with a god complex, and one insufferable tranny. There are a couple other devs, and they basically have no connection to the overall player base.

For those not in the know, ZDoom is the most moddable of the Doom source ports, by far. All those wild mods, like the DKC port in Doom, are in ZDoom. Aside from ACS (primarily for level scripting), it is (or was) powered by a scripting language called DECORATE. Basically, all the previously hardcoded weapons, monsters, lights, etc. were translated into DECORATE, and with these two tools, you could make just about anything, even if the code was spaghetti in the end.

The current devs have an obsession with doing things what they think is the "proper way." It's metastized in two big problems:

First, ZDoom is now horribly slow. If there was some hack that was providing a performance boost, even a significant one, or supporting older hardware, it was removed. That means you need a modern gaming PC to play most modern mods, even if they don't even come near modern visuals. For reasons that are way too complicated to get into here, Doom doesn't scale very well, particularly with map complexity. Complex maps will give your CPU a workout no matter what, and ZDoom being slower than ever before has made running some modern maps an actual hurdle.

Second, DECORATE, while still supported, has largely been supplanted by ZScript. While ZScript is more powerful, it was made by myopic programmers, for myopic programmers. The new features that ZScript theoretically makes available to modders, doesn't, in most cases. Sure, it basically turns Doom into a VM that runs Doom, and you could theoretically use it to make literally anything you want, but it's so overdesigned that you might as well just learn C++ and start a new source port.

All this is happening in a thoroughly poisoned community. Nearly all of the mods and devs have gone full proglodyte subhuman, and they're not very subtle about it. Combine the worst of social media behavior with the egos and power trips of old forums, and that's what you have now. For instance, on Doomworld, you have rules where you can't talk about certain banned users, who were banned when they didn't sufficiency prostrate themselves in prog humiliation rituals, and the mods who will ban you for mentioning them pretend not to know anything about it, egging users on in hopes that they'll break the rules so they can purge another heretic. They have, effectively, purged nearly all vocal opposition to them.

I think they've fucked themselves in the long run. The Doom player base is massive for an ancient game, but there's very few pillars supporting the community itself, and most of the ones left are progs doing it solely for their political interests. There's 30 years of history and nobody to pass it on to should the inevitable prog infighting/clout chasing occur.

As a side note, here's a weird fucking story: The original maintainer of the /idgames wad archive, and one of the devs for Boom (the first major source port to expand Doom), was in a relationship with his grandmother.