Has Smee been banned? If so, could a mod explain for which violation?
From what I read, I don't believe Smee has insulted Mace in this topic. Smee has been, in my opinion very stubborn (after talking to him about the whole issue, he told me he didn't read all of Mace's posts, which partially explains Mace's frustration) and he has been misreading the poll (believing being indifferent is the same as disagreeing, granted as Smee told me, a more precise poll "Do you prefer dotfv2 over dotf1" could have been made), but I don't believe Smee should have been banned.
With that being said, I personally feel Mace is unwarrantedly becoming the scapegoat for the dev team as a whole. I agree that straight up deleting the old dotf map was a mistake, but, from what I know, Mace is quite an active dev who listened to many in the community, notably regarding the changes for dotf2.
Furthermore, and although I am personally grateful to everyone in the MBII dev team for dedicating some of their free time towards improving the mod, I feel that other members, such as Stassin, are much more of a problem for MBII than Mace when it comes to the dev team being out of touch with what the community wants. This, however, does not mean in any way it is ok to insult devs in my opinion. While I have voiced in the past that I believe Stassin hears the feedback of many in the community but he does not listen to it, I am still grateful he is trying to make the game better.
With that being said, I believe the release of 1.5 exemplifies the disconnection between the dev team and the community. I personally enjoy the improvements for dueling servers and the faster projective speed in 1.5, much like the majority in the recent poll for the latter, but I do feel like the patch was rushed in order to, for some reason, please new players who came to know about MBII because of the solo movie?
We wanted to get a release going for the Solo movie, without delaying anymore. However open betas still hadn't nearly reached a conclusive state, and there wasn't nearly enough time to do more. Hence intensive internal testing.
The result is that the patch has some very weird changes that were based on very little feedback. In my opinion, and although I don't believe there is a poll on it, I have the conviction that most players aren't happy with red/purple being now overpowered in saberists vs gunner, and red dealing a ton of damage in duels.
Yes you're right making red/purple unflinchable was a last minute tweak in order to make them not 100% useless as flinch was staying.
The idea of rushing a patch that wasn't fully tested for what is arguably the least popular movie (in terms of numbers) is puzzling to me. Why was it so important to get an incomplete patch out by Solo's release, especially as an incomplete patch is likely to be an unstable one that will have some of its elements reworked, giving the feeling to new players that the mod's gameplay is unstable. Although I might be wrong, and the decision to rush the patch could be positive in that it somehow got new players who wouldn't have liked the previous interested in mbii, the decision was still done in spite of any sort of testing by the community.
As a result of decisions like these, and although the patch does, imo, fix many issues based on the community's feedback, many in the community feel like their opinion is not valued, creating resentment within the community that later creates resentment within the dev team.
In conclusion, the wall of text above was meant to say, imo, taking baby steps and making sure the community supports the dev teams' decision through better communication, notably polls, is the way to go. Now I'm not part of the MBII dev and I might be talking out of my ass, but I believe that, since it is impossible to please everyone, the majority should decide what should change in MBII. That does not mean I do not respect and value the opinion of more experienced and/or smarter, more knowledgeable people, but I believe that instead of their opinion being valued more highly than that of other players by the dev team as a whole (like advisors to a monarch), these players should do their best to convince the majority instead. Granted, this means that simply being better at conveying your ideas could mean that your opinion is more important than the opinion of someone who might be a better analyst but is bad at convincing others, but I'm not saying I have the perfect solution.
Having devs that are not representative, in that they do not make decisions that are supported by the majority, just results in a very negative environment where many in the community are dissing the dev team, some devs are doing the same back, some devs leave, and new devs taking changes that are meant to undo what previous devs did. While I might sound pessimistic, I believe the situation is better now than it used to be, while the foundations are not made out of steel, they are stronger than in the 1.4 era imo, so there's progress I'd say.