You're doing it on a bigger scale, and making it look _easy_. I know
that means it's anything but, and the skill and experience you're
bending to the task is anything but trivial.
Absolutely.
My original message only implied that, but I certainly *meant* it.
At least part of it would be the convenient packaging - like how a
pre-packed kit of bitz can generally sell for more than the same bitz on
their own.
This aligns with a German (I think it was 13Mannj) publisher who said that he was surprised his 'packs' of characters created from a bit of freely available software (or webpage?) sold so well. Why didn't people just generate their own, he asked? Convenient packaging, as you say.
(And you may have noticed, or I may have said, that convenient though I may find the website on occasions, I also really really like a not quite so 'ephemeral', definite 'object' like a PDF for librariany purposes as well as reading convenience. For reading it means there's a defined set of articles that I'm going to read and know roughly what time commitment that is, rather than a website I'm going to browse and get sucked into, or forget to go back to 'finish' etc. For the librarian in me there's a 'definitive' version of the article that I can add to a bibliography without fear that it's going to go away or change under my feet (although, don't start me on the nightmare of keeping up with PDF book revisions that DriveThru is constantly reminding me about!).
a) FT become (one of) the longest-running 3rd-party Trav magazines?
I keep meaning to do a word (page???) count comparison of JTAS Online vs Freelance Traveller. It would be a bit 'primitive' of course and doesn't speak of quality but my guess is that FT would now be the single biggest Traveller resource that exists. (If anyone has actual tools to automate this, I'd love to hear. The main reason I've not done it is because - for me - it would be a difficult/tedious/lengthy process of copying and pasting 100s and 100s of JTAS articles into, say, a Word document or three.
b) FreeTrav realise his accomplishment, a?
I hope Jeff basks in the glow occasionally. :-)