The problem with Holdfast is in my opinion how the community manages their regiments and events. It is all through seperate Discord servers. It is such a sloppy mess. In my opinion forums are far better to manage such a widespread community. If you use it simply for a regiment to communicate with each other, also because it is a lot cheaper and in most cases free, I could really live with that. Maybe I am growing old I do not know, but in my opinion sometimes what gets invented in the future is not always better than what exists in the past. Besides, the community is also very toxic (ofcourse it is an internet community, every has a bit of that), but still. If you come up with different ideas, they just cannot deal with it.
About the gameplay of Holdfast, I tried it and the gameplay is just not satisfying or by any means enjoyable. This got nothing to do with skill (I know I get shit on by a lot of players) the game feels very unresponsive, hitboxes are bugged. Also, I feel the game is more a shooting fest, especially on the public servers. To this day, I still feel NW is superior than any other Napoleonic game of its genre (except for the graphics, ofcourse Holdfast is eye candy compared to NW). We will have to see if Sword & Musket will be able to pull out something magical. I hope the Napoleonic singleplayer mod (Guns & Powder I think?) will be something good as well.
Only real solution is making NW an independent game which is not possible. FSE tried a while back and if I’m remembering correctly Paradox shot the idea down.
I get your point, it would be awesome to have another standalone Napoleonic game, but if that would have happened, if Paradox accepted it, then I am afraid it would have ended up like BCoF. It's almost like Holdfast but in the ACW period. I could be wrong, but seeing how long they worked on BCoF, and how dead it is right after release. It's worrying.