Not responding to the thread as a whole, but responding to this quote from Castle:
"First, all of those games mentioned have healthy, strong MOD communities which constantly churn out new maps, weaponry, and options. None of them are remotely the same as they were the day they were released, and most of the modifications come from fans who donated their time to create/alter content. "
Could you please, PLEASE, look into make moddable content in CoH/V? I've requested this several times and I know there were many others doing the same.
I remember seeing the first mods of CoH skins, primarily weapons and later capes, and thought, that's very nice.
It seems to me that the difference here, is that you would want some review board before 'officially' permitting a mod. As far as i know, people can still mod the game on the client side, but it would be nicer if you let the user community help out some with the 'content' side of the game.
As for missions, make all user mod missions be timed in case someone sneaks in a really nice PL gimmick or something. Or just allow people to submit creative mission plot ideas, along with mission text, etc. Give us a template that includes all the required text (things the contact says to give the mission, while still in the mission, after the mission, things npcs say in mission, clue text, etc.). So, even if you won't open up a tool to build missions, we could still add content to generic mission maps, just changing text. Of course, making maps would be very fun for some of our very creative players out there.
So some of the most obvious things that players could probably skin are costumes, faces, chest patterns, base items, weapons, capes, sounds. Then maybe you could permit missions, custom objects (of no value, just for placement in msisions for example, like the banners in the Freaklympics mission), maybe even zone-level npc dialog.
PLEASE
