Whilst the strength of the community will always help to overcome certain things, like missing maps, mods, skins, vehicles and such, there are certain things that development crew alone need to attend to. This is partly because they better than anyone else will understand the base code and partly because of legal reasons.
Unless a situation like "Savage" arises, where a player, clan or community purchases the rights to the game, then TWI and TWI authorised trustees will be the only people able to tend certain issues, like bugs and general patching.
For those who don't know "Savage" it was a hybrid RTS/3rd person hack'n'slash-come-shooter. One person was the "commander" who played the game as an RTS and built the base and researched weapons for the other players to use. One very influential player, Jeebus, ended up buying enough shares or something that he gained a casting vote in the majority decisions concerning the game, at least that's what i heard from way back when anyway.