True that, i remeber how many time they edited Thompson model... thousands of time unitl it was perfect. They also recruited a super skilled animator late in the development process that was ( and it's still the most annoying part of a mod, animations ) kinda rare
See, I like animating... the thing that bugs me the most is making sure the model is accurate & detailed enough and even worse is rigging the bones for animation so that they move the right parts the right way.
The moment all that is done and perfected, for me, the animation is a breeze..... perhaps sometimes tedious when you check, double check & triple check the flow of the animation, but I usually got things right the first time around, minus a slight adjustment here or there.
And yeah, with MN, the models and animations were pretty good, all things considered..... in DH, they spent a crap load of time fixing this, tweaking that, over and over again, yet still never right and the weapons, models & animations were still pretty mediocre. For the longest time, the sights on most of the weapons in the wrong perspective, in that they were too far away from the screen and you couldn't aim at anything decently because you ended up pixel hunting through a very small sight, while the rest of the sight & weapon blocked the rest of your screen where you were aiming..... and the moment you fired the weapon you'd have a muzzle flash that took up most of the screen, so unless your target was right in front of you, you lost your target quickly and your accuracy was crap.
Then I believe they tweaked the weapons a bit so that you could aim a bit better through the sights, but then the low poly count in the designs just became more apparent. I've also heard that they reduced the muzzle flashes so they were so distracting, but the last time I played, they were still pretty bad.
Then there's the scaling of the actual weapons:
http://media.pcgamer.com/files/2010/09/red-orchestra-11.jpg
^ The BAR looks about 2/3's the size it should be
http://www.wolfspain.net/images/stories/RED_ORCHESTRA/darkesthour/sten_hipped.jpg
^ I don't even know where to begin with how this Sten MKII looks so wrong.
But looking at Mare Nostrum's Designs:
http://www.freewebs.com/tacticalgamingrefuge/Shot00224.JPG
^ The textures, shading, modelling, perspective & proportion are so much better.
I mean, everybody can like what they like, but when I hear rumours about how some in the DH crew thought they could do better than TW & RO or that it was a much more superior game than RO (or even Mare Nostrum) I just shake my head. I've seen a few people defend DH as being the far more superior game to Ostfront because it had piles more content, yet at the same time, these are the same people who make claims that TW should focus on fixing the bugs in RO2 before they start bringing content, as "Quality is better than Quantity"
DH has quantity, but I didn't see much quality.
Even back when TW was called the "RO Team" working on the Mod for UT2004, their models, animations and map quality were better than what I seen in DH..... and Mare Nostrum felt more like it headed in the right direction as RO was. You could still tell it was a mod, but things just seemed to work better, the weapons were better with accuracy, etc.