By the time renewed is all done transfering all the stuff from legacy, 1.17 will be long out already
Aye aye :p hopefully Mevans can focus on the not map aspects for now (like NPCs!)
I think that once everything is ported to 1.15.2 we will get it for the latest update, since the hard thing is implementing everything from 1.7 to 1.15 (8 updates!), compared to maybe three to four uptades.
Yeah that would be great with the world limit changes. Finally Erebor won't look like a tiny hill.
From the datapacking perspective, I don't think there were too many major core changes from 1.15 to 1.17 snapshots. Biomes and dimensions were changed in 1.16, so it'll be interesting to see how Mevans handles it (will Middle-Earth continue to use a seperate biome system?)
Concerning the announcement of reversion of changes in world-generation in 1.17, I think data packs can still revert to the experimental generation. So if Mevans wishes, there may still be glorious caves and new heights and depths in Middle-Earth.
I think those things will be saved for 1.18 (World gen part of 1.17, if you didn't know), since that, as said, is the part where the world gen is changed. As for the datapack part, it is purely meant as a "demonstrator" or preview for those who want to see what's coming in 1.18, and isn't as stable or reliable as the full release will be, so from a modding perspecitive it would probably be weird to make a mod in that "beta" version.
What happened was basically:
They made an ambitious plan to release 1.17 with new generation in summer.
They made the new generation, but it had flaws, and importantly, the problem of older worlds being ported to 1.17 with the new height and depth changes and generation was a big problem.
They decided to revert the changes in 1.17 and fix and apply the generation in the next update, so that they could release 1.17 according to their plans.
However, the text on the wiki implies that the changes were done simply by changing the settings in the worldgen (which can be modified by data packs) to disable new caves and revert the height and depth to the old values. I have not actually tested this stuff, but this means that data packs should still be able to use this.
It was not meant to be a teaser for the new generation in 1.18, it was meant to be for 1.17, but they had to revert it due to shortage of time.
I don't fully understand what you're meaning, but it seems like you know this stuff well!
In short, they wanted to release the generation changes but they were short on time to fix stuff so they just disabled it.
What do you think?