You're quite right, I did only hear of Insurgency maybe a year ago and I never frequented their forums. However, in a time where gamers are openly lied to by professional game developers, you'd have to be pretty green to believe everything a mod team tells you - and I'm not even talking about release dates. I remember a thread in this forum about some game/mod called 1944 D-day, just read the feature list and tell me it's not full of **** with a straight face.
Perhabs it was naive to belive a word they said, but honestly, i whilst i have been burned badly by many retail games, i have never been burned like this with any mod before Ins, i've seen them fall too short of their potential, not have some features yet that they said they where planning for this release, and ofcourse the bugs, stuff like that, but i've never seen a mod betray its own vision so fast and so utterly, and i hope i never will again.
As for this 1944 D-day buisness, i have no idea what that is (never saw that thread i guess), the only mod i know under that name was made for Quake-II, and has been out of development for many many years.
It was good though, for its time.
Anyway, I do agree with the bad PR work. I was seriously pissed off at the INS team when they postponed the release with a bunch of half-assed excuses, especially the donations. That is certainly NOT the way to do it.
Well, be happy that you haven't followed it more clousely then, because that is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to PR blunders from thease guys.. there really has not been any shortage of "ohh t3h drama" moments, if you know what i mean.
On the bright side, I played INS when it was released non-stop and I hardly encountered any bugs aside from the screwed up class system and the spawnraping, which are indeed annoying. INS is after all a solid shooter with room for improvement, and it's actually being improved. Not too many mods are still spoken of 2 weeks after their release, most are stillborn.
Its all a matter of opinion really, you have yours, i have mine, and thats fine.
And really, had the Ins Dev's just been up front about what kind of mod they where making, it would all just have been water under the bridge, just yet another mod i wasen't really that interested in but might try just for kicks, you know the sort.
But instead, they chose to get us realism fans all hyped up, jerked us around for years, and then punched us in the face on release day.. atleast thats how it feels, and thats why we are not just apathetic about Ins, but actually angry with it.
I could also imagine other reasons for the hostility towards INS on this board but they're unproven gossip.
Again, i am not sure what you are aiming for there..