[IstuntmanI]

Great decision, to be honest ! I considered 0.3.8 to be pretty fail since the start. Such a huge new feature like model downloading would fit perfectly in a new version from a new branch, like 0.4a, not at the end of a branch ! Such a huge feature can create lots of bugs so you would have to release even further versions in the branch to fix them. Also, such a huge feature has to come with other things too: custom radar, custom sounds eventually, custom vehicles, custom weapons, custom map icons and so on. The latest 0.3 version was supposed to be 0.3x. Everything after it should have been mainly critical security patches. Another good idea would have been to make a RC5, but instead of 0.3.8 RC5 to call it 0.4a RC1 and take your time to release it.

Model downloading was pretty buggy and it created lots of edge cases: it wasn't working in request class (I know you said that it is legacy code, but that should be updated and make it to allow custom models), wasn't working as pickups and when you changed the world you couldn't put the player straight in a vehicle because the "artwork" being set to 1 made the sync of worlds a bit different. Hopefully 0.4a will have this feature a bit different. In the way you made it it would have created some problems when upgrading to the new SA-MP version. This upgrading problems and edge cases are what made me to not be interested TOO MUCH in the downloading feature. I was seriously considering to disable "artwork" on my server because of all these problems.

Hopefully it won't take another 2 years for a new version and hopefully you won't go further in the 0.3 branch. It's the time for a new branch. 0.3 is stable enough (but there are still few crashers/player buggers available that can't be fixed without plugins ! I reported them in a topic in this section, but weirdly it didn't attract your attention). Also, I think that it would be a nice idea to go with the 0.4.0 or 0.4.1 naming (can't remember exactly what the internal version was for 0.3a), not with 0.4a, as problems like in the 0.3 branch could appear in the future too and you will have to adopt again weird naming.