Okay, the argument "we are hobbyists, so don't abuse us" sucks, because you already ask people for money on Patreon. I don't think, that community donates too much, though. Because you ignore them
The argument "wiki describes Morrowind vanilla behaviour, bla, bla, bla" sucks, because, you know, there are some industry standards. I mean, modern standards. Nope, don't speak about Bethesda games - they already got their portion of jokes about using Morrowind engine in Fallout 86. And squares on the noses in Skyrim... And Oblivion plastic faces... Because the Bethesda games are the refugium of obsolete and exotic solutions, but Marmoset Toolbag is one of the industry standards. Yes, your wiki sucks, as your arguments.
The argument "the engine will never be released if we begin to add new features before 1.0" sucks for 2 reasons:
1) It might work, but you have rivals like MGEXE, MCP etc. They already give much more options both for players and modders. You are just useless.
2) You dislike "negativity", yep? I think you will dislike indifference even more. Old devs will leave the project, it's a normal process. But the new ones will go to your rivals, not to you. So it looks like OpenMW will never be released in this case too
Actually, it's the point of no return now: you can continue to ignore users - and you won't get even "negativity", just no reaction at all. Or you can try to change the opinion of the Morrowind modding community - and you already have understood, what the community thinks about you and your project. The current state of your "Example Suite" is a perfect illustration of this opinion. At least, the opinion of the artists of the community. Because this project now is a real crap, pardon me my French. The artists already ignore you, just like you ignore them. It's honest, isn't it?
And yep, shadows were "almost here" when your project used Ogre. So this argument is the same
The argument "you didn't donate anything" is quite relevant, after all
Because now I'm really not going to donate you anything. I could donate to you a character mesh, but now I won't do it
P.S. It looks like your engine has some problems with polygon normals. I mean, accidentally, the faces with smoothing group 2 were flipped in that mesh, screen from the Morrowind engine:
What did you speak about "emulating vanilla Morrowind behaviour"?
P.P.S. I'm going to finish this mesh at the New Year's holidays. So I make you a Christmas gift, though you were bad boys in this year: you still can get this mesh with all source files. Maybe. If you will be able to implement at least shadows and subsurface scattering in
this year. Even in non-stable version. I know, I know, I'm too generous to yuo... But the Christian God tells us to be kind to our neighbour...