Yes originally the NC part got tacked on because some massive repository required (under the SA part) that we keep it, and we don't have a paper trail.
I doubt that the NC part of our license is the bottle neck that's limiting our exposure and promotion at this point. I haven't studied it, so you might have a point. I don't want to be completely dismissive of the idea that gaming media may be looking over us because of our license. Although if that's really the case, then that's unfortunate that something like two letters in a license will lead a gaming outlet to reject attention to a game that won PC Gaming's mod of the year just for that, and I want to think so much the worse for them. Edit: I'm kind of sour on the whole economics of gaming promotion to begin with; it's one of the things TDM has been refreshingly clear of and even part of our ethos (if corporate gaming won't do it, fans will do it themselves). But before I even get to that stage, my first intuition is that it would be a massive, potentially impossible, task tantamount to kicking a pack of rabid sleeping dogs for marginal results, a few people here and there even if it works.
And to add another category of cases I don't think mentioned yet, everybody that created and submitted assets to the project (possibly including every FM; I'd have to look at that again), did so under that license. So technically you'd have to get all of their consent to relicense their contributions, and some of them haven't posted or responded to messages in years.
And for that matter some contributors, like me, don't actually want to relicense and would refuse because, at least in my case, I've seen first hand that commercialization-talk leads to actual dysfunction in the management of the mod. That's not to say that dropping the NC part will necessarily open us up to that by itself. It's more like, sometimes we get people coming in making waves with commercialization talk, and the easiest most convenient way we can shut it down--without having to have a 6 hour lecture on organization theory & small team interpersonal dynamics--is just point to that part of our license and be done with it. Those two letters have done more good than harm for us at least in that respect.
I'm ok with more promotion and exposure, but we hit some limits before (like trying to get on digital platforms) that still make us hesitate for things calling for massive structural changes to the mod. We were lucky we got it standalone and it'd have to be something pretty amazing to go through something like that again, which this really isn't.
Next month will mark our 10th year of release without any issues with our assets or licensing (beyond the heroic efforts to get 2.0 out), and we've had one of the coolest communities making some of the coolest stuff in gaming out there. Why would we kick a bunch of rabid sleeping dogs now?