Chris - Great - I'll take you up on it - If we are successful enough for you to be able to take a customized client to IRI that would be a nice achievement. PM me (or write to the address in my signature) to tell me how I can connect with you.
Brendan - Did I scare you off?
About IRI - I think that the IRI organizers are planning to repeat having 5th Gear there for the 3rd year in a row; but... Let's let them be the people who actually commit (or don't) - I think that they will be able to do it; but I'm not promising for them.
The other recent suggestions are all good (fix tunnler strafing, revive previous games, etc.) and are either problems we know we need to fix or improvements we hope to work in over the summer.
Cleaning up the existing code and so that we can efficiently expand the number people in our development team, and actually coordinating that expansion are competing for our time. The result will be good and will accelerate progress, but the start-up delay is frustrating for you and us - Thanks for sticking with us and for all the kind words about liking and using the simulator.
Let's get these client classes ready for distribution and then while you (our users) are having fun with them, I/we will move on to the next items in our fix/improvment lists.
Blake