It has jank, but I don't know anyone who stopped playing because of it.

I stopped playing because I could no longer figure out how to install mods. There's a mod manager, but it doesn't seem to work.

Ckan works for me if it’s a different mod manager you use. I’ve been using it for like at least 5 years without issue.

Ckan is the one I tried to use, but the resulting KSP1 installation usually threw a ton of exceptions at runtime. Maybe it's just compatibility issues -- those weren't called out, though.

I see you're not a rocket scientist.

The jank was sometimes part of the fun

The jank was also forgivable when it was a one man effort or a very small team. Plus it was a relatively novel idea for the game being created for the first time. It also made no grandeur promises of what was to come, and continually made improvements.

Take Two and KSP2 have none of the same forgivable qualities.

The jank was acceptable because it was supposed to be a simple 2D game that ended up outgrowing it's diapers as it grew, and being a Unity project a long time ago, was stuck on abysmal physics systems. It couldn't NOT be jank. Everyone always "wanted" a better physics system or game engine entirely, because KSP1 was often held back by Unity, but that would have definitely killed the project.

Then KSP2 is like, still on Unity? Despite massive amounts of budget and like no compelling reason to stay on Unity with the backing of a real game company.

> like no compelling reason to stay on Unity

One benefit of Unity is moddability.

But yeah, thats not really worth the drawbacks for something like KSP.

The Kraken.