Instead there is no evidence that Oni makes any effort to make his life or workflow easier.
There is. You can see it in the code changes. A lot of the flags for the character were one off flags before. He's since moved them to OOP. This current partial update being broken? That's because he's re-writing some of the function to take advantage of inheritance. Even in just up keeping the linux version of SLDR's cheat enabler, I've had to change the code from using regex patterns to search for copy and pasted code to changing it to look for just one line of code because he started to take advantage of templating.
You don't see any evidence because you didn't bother to look.
"Well, then why do modders have a hard time?"
Have you ever tried to make an automated way to modify external code without it caring for what you do while it's in the middle of being refactored? Modding is a precarious thing to begin with. You're *MODIFYING* the game in ways it was never intended. When you're writing mods for a game that's in active development, unless the game is guaranteeing a solid interface for data manipulation in the back end (which, to my knowledge, no game has ever done this. No, not even MMORPG's. I've checked.) and/or front end manipulation, you will ALWAYS be trying to hit a moving target. Hell, even Microsoft's own API's for their cloud platform has changed their commands, syntax, and parameters. Creating new ones and deprecating old ones. Like, I need to find time to rewrite ALL my chrome plugins because google decided it wanted to block adblockers by changing the way the ENTIRE CORE OF CHROME HANDLES NETWORK CALLS (I'm still mad about that and it's been close to a year since it happened. Literally thinking of ditching chrome-based browsers altogether because of it. Fucking manifest v3...). Now imagine modding a game with all that AND it's in the middle of refactored. It's not even like hitting a moving target. It's like hitting a moving target while both are on shifting sands.
This is also why SLDR's cheat enabler is one of the things/mods for this game that's survived for...*checks date* close to 4 years and maintained with minimal effort. HALF the life span of this game. Rather than modding the static assets of the game itself, it's taking advantage of the tools the game itself provides to make changes. This is why it a) takes so little to update it. b) why I bother to help troubleshooting for it. It's good, clean code and a joy to work with.
Let me put this final nail in the coffin. My version of 1.5b of this game? Short of the missing art assets, it doesn't crash. Why? Because the code changes that broke the game made enough sense to me AS A PROGRAMMER that I was able to fix it really quickly and easily. I could read it and go "Oh, I know why he's doing that." and make the proper changes to fixed what he missed. It would have taken me 1.5~2 times as long for a 0.7x update. That's how much the code has improved.
