I think I have managed to put together a complete collection of all the non MERP ICE titles for myself, and I didn't allow myself to get heisted for it. . .replacing books that get rocked in use or lost, one came across some of the pirates of the internet age. . .if you caught some of the silly prices people were asking for some of these out of print books, you know what I mean.
So, from that perspective, revision or not, a part of me likes to see these books come back from legal limbo. Just because it's two versions old, doesn't mean you might not be happy to get your hands on a legal copy of Sea Law. . .and happy to be able to do so at a reasonable price. Some of my RM books, I either never use, or I used like one or two paragraphs from page 32, but I still like having them (and I may have used them more way back when).
On the other side, it irks me that there are books out there where nobody really has the legal rights to them and they sit in that limbo. It's kind of hard to complain about piracy when you don't make any effort to make your titles legally available. If you want Sea Law, and you can't buy it, you are forced to steal it, now it's available again, so you don't have to.
Working on the revision, and turning your back on previous versions and not bothering to try and fix this particular mess seems sort of like tooting your own horn while treating your parents and grandparents badly. How can you love Rolemaster enough to want to work on it, and kick dirt on these books without even trying some minimal effort to help them back out of Limbo?
To me at least, it has nothing to do with money or usable materials at this point, it's sort of like an ugly scar on the landscape, which I chose to walk out to and poke with my shovel every now and then, toss a handful of seeds, and walk home. . .it doesn't really seem like very much effort expended to me, but over a long period of time we have managed to find a lot of people, clear a lot of the wreckage and heal some of the damage done.
Does that make sense to you, in explaining my motivations?