I have VERY mixed feelings about Newtonian Aurora.
On one hand it is an excellent idea and a system that I would love to see work and play around with.
On the other, it is time not spent on Aurora II, which even if the FTL elements were not added, represents an immense improvement of the base game.
But, as a developer of hobby projects myself, I understand it since the best way to ensure you are interested and keep working is to keep doing interesting stuff, implement new features, while the boring, long and annoying process of porting tends to sap excitement and time, while essentially landing you feature-wise exactly where you are now.
Hmm, I wonder if Steve would ever accept community aid on this, or if donations improve CONSIDERABLY, professional assistance? Just to get the code ported. I understand he does not wish to open source it but I can still hope.
Though... on the open source side, I am reminded what ToadyOne of Dwarf Fortress did with the OpenGL code. He basically posted source of a MUCH older unrelated game which uses the same drawing engine as DF. The community stepped in and OpenGL'fied the code, fixing it and improving its performance considerably, after which he took the resulting product and merged it with DF source, in the end keeping DF closed but still getting help from the community.
I wonder if that is possible with the Aurora and Aurora II UI? If there isn't too much game logic in there is it possible to post it and have the community help and pretty it up, while keeping the backend (the interesting stuff) closed? Particularly, I am thinking of the system and galaxy views. This is a decisively non-artist game, but those two can still do with some love.