I think the problem in Freelancer can best be summed up in two basic facts:
1) The game doesn't have any real support for modding so it is very limited in what you can actually change.
2) There are a lot of people out there that misunderstand "mod" and think it means "cheat" & "hack" so you end up with an unusually high number of "modders" who have no intrest in the community.
In my serveral years working on mods for many games I have never seen a community quite like this one. There was allways some degree of "theft" but it was the exception, not the rule and it was a lot easier to spot becuase with so many possibilities, or at least more flexibility, for the mod authers the chances of two independant people coming up with the same solution was highly unlikely. Here this isn't the case, after all when you only have some data file to modify how many different ways are there really to make a ship that wasn't flyable into a ship the players can buy and fly.
I guess the sad thing for me is knowing that it doesn't matter if I have never even played Rebalance, TNG or some of the other big mods out there (or even downloaded them for that matter) It's a good possibility that I'll be accused of "stealing" ideas, if not by the authors then by the players. I think the community as a whole has a bad case of paranoia and a lot of people need to take a little vacation or get laid or something
On the bright side, I've seen some people make some rough entries into the community and then turn out to be decent, helpful members so I'm not completely without hope. Yeah SubXero, that last part is about you