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3) The community is splendid. NetHack's open-source, so there's a lot of discussion on rather nerdy topics like "what's the minimum number of turns required for an ascension?" Most of the posters on rec.games.roguelike.nethack seem incredibly educated and dignified. When they get into flamewars, it's usually more along the lines of witty repartee than an insult-fest. They're awfully generous -- they're always patching the game and offering suggestions and improvements to the "DevTeam" (all for free!). They're very courteous to newbies, and sometimes even answer posts that have no relevance to the newsgroup. (Not to say you should post those sorts of things.)
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Wow, that's like totally awesome. Totally. I think an open source strategy game would be even more awesome. People can create different unit attack/hit point values and experiment with them. And this would be very math intensive - since you can't just rely on the gathering rate/villager second values that someone else derived.
Then arguments could go about with "which unit attack/defense values would make the game the most balanced between civilizations?" Of course, those arguments carry a subjective element to them. The problem with infinite changeability though, is that people need a common game ground to argue/talk about.
Maybe a RTS version of Robocode. Ai-scripting for RTS games is pretty difficult (and yields a lot of potential), given that the current RTS AIs really really suck (especially on water maps, since AIs suck at sending multiple transports to land - in Civ III, AoK, AoE, AoM, etc..).
People in Open-Source communities also tend to gear games towards more intelligent audiences (and audiences that want to learn more about the mechanics of the game: I want the option to read print outs of certain values of X within subroutines), rather than towards the public masses (masses whose other interests involve gambling, TV, watching sports, idle chatter, and gossip). The interests of those masses probably explain why the most popular games are now MMORPGs and 9999 Sims expansions (though I know some very intelligent people - International Olympiad participants - who are also hooked on World of Warcraft).
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I also downloaded off BitTorrent a nice research paper about the motivations of individuals who work behind open source software (counterintuitive if one relies on traditional economic models). They're very interesting.
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