Editor Troubles

[TheGreatCthulhu]

This question/comment is directed first and foremost to Frictional Games devs, and than also to anyone familiar with the topic.

About the tools: there must be something I'm missing here...
I've used Notepad++ to open some of the files generated by one editor or the other, and to my surprise, some of the resources are defined using the absolute path...


What in the world would cause this - because, unless manually corrected, such files wouldn't work on another person's system.
I'm guessing you guys didn't manually edit all the files shipped with the final game...
So, something must be causing this behavior, and that something is not documented.

Next, when importing COLLADA files, do they need to be textured beforehand, or must not have materials, so that engine-specific format can be applied? The model editor often behaves funny with materials - if I try to assign/change, it appears it works, but then it doesn't show when tested, the path in the file is absolute, and sometimes the map won't load the entity at all. Why? What steps are required to make this work as expected? Dunno, because it's not documented.

If you try to create a "total conversion", you have to deal with a bunch of config file options, most of which are not documented, and when you finally think you figured it out, you start up the game, and it crashes because some resource could not be loaded, and then you realize that you'd have to spend the whole day hoping to guess how the game works internally and what data it looks for to find out where to find stuff it needs just so that you can start up the damned thing, again all because any of it is not documented.
Is it possible for a "total conversion" mod to use both the resources from the original game and the new content?
Has anyone successfully created a total conversion yet?

So basically we are all stuck with custom stories, but there are potential problems even with that if the editors prefer to use absolute paths...
Now, I know that some custom stories have been published - and I tried running a few myself - which means that people were able to create them successfully. Then, why am I seeing this behavior with regard to the editors?
It seems to me that if one wants to create something beyond a simple level or a connected array of them, if anyone wants to go beyond rearranging the premade models and entities, than one must be a psychic and read the minds of the developers, so that one can have a clue how the various parts of the system interact.

Thus, my question is, are there any special requirements which will make the editors behave as expected, and when we may expect all this to be documented in a more organized fashion?

Until then, if any of this is actually written somewhere, where is that metaphorical needle in the haystack?