What? No cries of "DoooooooooOOOOooooooooooooOOOOoooooooooooOOOOoooo oooom!"?
doom
You should not be surprised when you receive a response of an overwhelming 'meh.'
While I like your suggestion it has not only been suggested before (in various other versions of the general idea) but I sadly think it would be a virtual miracle for the Devs to regear this game to allow for it. This is the kind of suggestion that makes more sense for a "CoH2" if that's ever going to happen.
As far as this game is concerned I'd be satisfied if the Devs allowed players to submit candidate artwork for the Rescuer, Clothes Horse, Fashionable and Ostentatious badges because those badges have lingered for YEARS without proper artwork. At this point it seems the only way those badges will be done is if eager players do the work for them ourselves. *shrugs*
Loth 50 Fire/Rad Controller [1392 Badges] [300 non-AE Souvenirs]
Ryver 50 Ele� Blaster [1392 Badges]
Silandra 50 Peacebringer [1138 Badges] [No Redside Badges]
--{=====> Virtue ♀
So the MArc got me thinking... and perhaps these lines have already been considered. But it might be worth mentioning anyway.
Players contributed a wealth of content very rapidly for the game, when provided with the tools to do so. And if we'd been given more extensive scripting options, I'm confident they'd have been readily employed. The same goes for the creation of maps -- even tilesets and new object skins. I've seen the same happen in other games. While it's true that as complexity to create a particular content element rises, the number of players contributing content decreases, I suspect there is almost no level of content at which at least a few players would not still rise to.
So... hey. Why not let people?
Okay, okay, I know the answer to that. But I'll modify: Why not let people submit content for review and inclusion into the game?
There's an obvious hurdle there too -- the flood of new material could easily overwhelm the moderators. But I think the community can self-moderate to a certain degree, if provided the tools to do so. The surprisingly high average judgment and integrity of a self-moderating community has been demonstrated in places as diverse as Wikipedia, FPS map editing, and Newgrounds. (I'm using a very specific definition for judgment and integrity, mind.)
So, here's how it works. Say guidelines are released for creating new costume elements, and a 'viewer' tool is created so that average users can download these elements and view them on blank mannequin models of the appropriate body type(s), similar to the existing costume creator. Intrepid amateur graphical designers create an element, then create a thread in the newly-minted Player Submitted Content forum. Other players rate the thread based on their vote for the element's quality -- or, better yet, have a new tool, "nominate." Threads with either a certain rating after a certain time/number of views OR threads with with a certain number of nominations are then brought to the attention of the content moderators, who do some basic QC and then pass it to the appropriate internal department. There would probably be a queue for this -- say, no more than 3-12 (by category) 'accepted' submissions per category (Costume, Object, Map, etc) per month.
As far as I know, this would be a true first for MMOs, but it's proven successful in similar games already. The infrastructure would be a fair amount of work, but it seems like the payoff could be pretty massive in terms of new content over time. I mean, hey -- just the ability to create new decorative objects for bases would be huge.