Well, if the budget was truly sparse, I find myself wondering, was there a Kickstarter at some point to get some funds up front for the art?

Best way to help would be to spread the word about rolemaster and get more people to buy it.   The more sales each book has, the more money can be budgeted for the next one.

Throwing 8-10% of funds (and time) away on a kickstarter doesn't seem a great way to improve anything.

The arming sword is given a weight of 2.5 lbs., while the short sword is given 3 lbs. I'm pretty sure the short sword should actually be 1.5 lbs.

I'm not a fan of the covers. But, I don't like obviously digital art, so I've got an instant biased right there. I think it looks cheap (from a quality standpoint) a vast majority of the time. And, I'm sure, to a degree it literally is (actual cost) as there are no material costs involved and you can try as many times as you want to make something that looks cool. Sure, you have to pay for the program and your computer, but after that it's all simply your time - which is worth something, but not in the same way that $1000 is.

I've got a good amount of framed art around my house and only one of them is digital... and it doesn't look like it. It looks like the original piece was an actual painting.
Actually, I do have a set of six digital pieces: Nerdy Star Wars, Firefly and Dr Who mixed silhouette/word art. But most my stuff is Elmore, Easley, Caldwell, Parkinson, some of my own photography, etc.

Thing is, I couldn't really care less about the art for Rolemaster. I end up deconstructing the books and making my own anyhow. Probably not the normal response though.

Ignoring Classic, RM2 II RAW all professions are usually stuck at 1 rank per level for PPD. So it is just costing spell users DP to have much the same PPs as per level rule.

RM2 II level bonuses make the skill more viable given the DP costs.

However, Semi’s who don’t get the Magical level bonus are paying DPs but falling behind on PPs.

I think it would be best to not use PPD (if that is possible in FG) and use per level rule instead due to the negative impact on DP expenditure, especially on those Semi’s who don’t get the level bonus.

It's April, and I just thought again: How great would it be to not only have a Cyradon setting book, but also the mentioned new Cyradon material ... might it be soonish?

With RMU and Against the Darkmaster, there seems to be some renewed interest in "the Rolemaster family", and it would be great if Cyradon could profit of it.

Also, I still think that Cyradon, as a setting, was a little ahead of its time and might find a lot of fans these days. It's not as stuck in D&D tropes as a lot of other settings out there these days, and feels a lot more inspired by relatively modern fantasy literature. Nearly twenty years ago, it already took a step away from "evil races" and stuff like that and presented a more complex situation.

Maybe I'm misreading HARP, but especially when looking at the "Folkways" and "Beyond the Veil" supplements, it always seems like an RPG more interested in drawing from the breadth of fantasy literature than in the self-referentiality of a lot of other RPGs. I think there must be an audience for that, and Cyradon would certainly be a great figurehead for that idea. I love Against the Darkmaster, but it falls back quite consciously to 80s Tolkien pastiche fantasy; Cyradon could showcase that HARP can offer a broader scope.