In this case it sort of does... The simple fact is that one project is open, posts its source code, asks for anyone to help, etc, and the other attacks people who point out bugs unless the people who point them out are themselves incapable of understanding how easy to fix or hard to cause in the first place the bugs are.
When it comes to this project, actions going past from before even the start of it owe to nothing but censorship on the part of RD, where any dissenting opinion is removed and the only way we have to warn people of the state of his FE is PMs they can't even reply to due to their new user status. That doesn't make us look like people who care about the community and the fiction, they makes us look like crazy conspirators.
As for the Redux, which in no way pretends to be "FE" itself and in fact is part of a project called "Rebuild", the very fact the project is itself independent hurts your ego argument. The purpose of the project is to fix FE and other landmark campaigns and those fixes to be integrated in whatever needs them (which would include RD's FE).
If someone posts about testing VSR's balance in a topic about playing competitively with the stock 1.3 Recycler do you claim that is about ego? If someone has a topic about a map and another person shows their map as well and asks for critique and comparison is that about ego? When RD posts about his updated G66, Uler, or FE in any topic about the older originals is that about ego? When RD posts and says "I added X feature to G66/FE/Uler" in a topic that has nothing to do with the mods is that about ego?
You need to think about these and either decide that everything is about ego, nothing is about ego, or that you are extremely biased.
Simply put, in this case it is not ego but reverence for the prior works though the testing and comparisons of their derivatives.
As for actual work on the FERedux: I would have more of the stuff converted to C++ by now but I've been working with OvermindDL1 on a LUA mission DLL. I have about 60% of the functions bound so far. That is about 200 of 370 or so. Once they are done I will use the Rebuild of FE as a test-bed, switching from C++ to LUA, given that the LUA scripts are flat cleaner and easier then the C++ in many ways.