First, this should not be one of our contests, this should be a demonstration of all the talent we possess here, and as such should be restricted as little as possible to best allow for that to be drawn out. You're not explicitly advocating a strict theme be used, but I feel I should mention that that would be counteractive to enabling a mapper's freedom, for obvious reasons. Limiting creative freedom and what-have-you., what you do seem to be pushing is this idea of lots of different map settings in one big grab bag.
I'm not a fan of that because of what that means for the collection of maps, as a whole. I mean what if we get say, a map in the jungle like Borneo, a map on a beach like Ventus and four maps set in Egypt. The open ended-ness of a "Holiday" or "Exotic" theme could leave one theme dangerously unused and another dangerously overused. Or what if we don't get all the maps we were hoping to get by the end of it and one or two popular themes are left out. I said it quite simply in the chat: "I'd be expecting drastically different themes every time." And if I didn't get that, I'd be pretty disappointed.
Doom's responded to this better than i could. Plus, we could just communicate and try and avoid overlap.
A quick point about checking back in September to see if the theme would be worth continuing at that point, you said yourself that at that time, most if not all of the maps would still be in alpha, could we get an accurate idea of whether something will sink or swim so early in the development process?
Mostly, it's about constantly re-evaluating the process. The last thing we want to do is take stock and find we've nothing to show for it. (And i think if we didn't set definite dates for it we'd just forget it.) This sort of thing also keeps motivation and drive going, and allows us to ensure we're getting quality. I would say one of the things for us to do would play a few gamedays on each map and give each one as massive a feedback-dump as possible. It also allows us, if we chose to, to attract outside interest.
My second major point, is that if, 3 months in, we don't like how we're progressing, that's still 3 months gone. You said that any alpha maps could be rethemed easily to account for any changes in decisions or that we could start new maps. I'll concede that the alpha maps that were already in progress could still make it to the end, but starting new maps with a 3 month handicap isn't a good idea, and should be a worst case scenario only, and this idea of picking a them NOW and we'll see if it works in 3 months time makes the possibility of starting fresh higher than what a worst case scenario ought to be.
The trouble is, if we don't pick a theme at the start, it's much harder to add one in later. I think the chances of us discarding a theme and multiple people choosing to restart or significantly rework their maps are pretty low, although yes, the consequences are worse.
I seriously, seriously believe that a theme is a good thing - and i think i'm not alone in this?- and I also believe that if we don't pick one now, we don't get one.
My opinion is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with just making maps to the best of our ability, and putting that out there as the final outcome for this adventure, their cohesiveness is in their quality, not the fact that all the maps look like they're each from different countries.
Quality is... not really a quality in itself. Releasing a map pack where the overarching theme is "the maps in this are good." is kinda like a film called "All the actors can act". Quality is not something to aim for: it is the baseline step one of this sort of thing. Merely saying "but they're good" is by itself not going to get us server operators.