I am sure that the overall majority of casual players who do not hang out here are happy to download factions and ship designs without the bells and whistles that have come to dominate this forum.
The impression I get is that the vanilla game is unsatisfactory in most ways and when the various mods are used, the game has little resemblance to the game as released.
I hope that future changes to the game reduces the need to mod the game in the ways that we see today.
And, maybe I am totally wrong and there are more people playing the regular game than it seems.