Well, I think I can sum it up pretty succinctly: It's mostly because I absolutely loathe RPG Maker. It's far too generic to make a professional-level game. All the features are too limiting, time consuming, slow, terribly slow, and extremely slow. Performance is, again, terrible. It's closed source. Worst possible engine-level languages (ruby/javascript) and to even start to make something that "doesn't seem like an RPGMaker game" requires you to rewrite most of the scripts and engine. All the FF clones made with RPG Maker are terrible. It's overpriced and overrated. I think the rpg community should make themselves a new program to replace RPG Maker, otherwise it's just going to get worse. Let's be honest, RPGMaker obviously doesn't care about RPG's at all, they just want to sell a rehashed RPGM2K to people with little or no technical know-how. :)


That said, I really need to start working on this again. I managed to get a major amount of important things done last year, but this year has been clumsy to say the least. Right now I'm floating with the possibility of turning it into a ZC "rewrite" in the case that something else IRL comes up which might completely kill it, but we'll see. Right now everything is dependent on the GUI getting done, which is the most painful and slowest part. All I can say about the GUI is I went through over a dozen GUI libs last year and they were all terrible and I ended up writing my own. The downside is that it is much slower to get up and running; the upside is that all data and code is inherent to the system so it's very fast and everything works without having to hack, splice, or couple everything together. I think the time wasted will be made up later on; that's my story and I'm sticking to it. :)

Cheers.