It’s hard to believe your myth, you’re right.
Imagine that installing and configuring HDmod takes 3 times longer than it does now. And there are a couple more pages of options added. And they all appear during installation; there’s no free ride with default settings.
And yes, there are also a few more crashes.
Plus, let’s remove cranim and the ability to choose a template, so you have to do it manually, the old-fashioned way. And let’s remove something else... for example, the option to choose the resolution through a menu; instead, you have to enter it manually in the ini file.
And let’s add some nasty thing. Let’s say we add a bug to the network protocol, so that to connect to an opponent, you have to enter their IP address not in a window, but in another ini file.
The question is, will this lead to a mass rejection of HDmod? For the sake of the experiment, let’s assume that there are no old versions (and there never were) – either this one or a bare SoD.
The answer, I think, is obvious – people will use it and say thank you.
Conclusion?