How about instead of hiring artists to release new mechs, PGI instead hires programmers to fix their fucking bugs and create new content that is bug free.
Artists are cheap and plentiful. Software engineers competent enough to handle coding of an engine like this are few in number and generally quite highly paid. It's not easy to find them either where as every city has an excess of artists looking for work.
The problem with the game is that its boring and stale and PGI can't successfully create fun, meaningful endgame content to retain new players.
By its very definition end-game content has little relevance to retention of new players; it matters to long-term players instead. New players would more likely disappear due to being overloaded at first with the game's complexity. Secondly what is the actual retention rate of new players in MWO compared to other games? Is it actually lower? Without those statistics its just pointless conjecture. Finally MWO's active population in 2016 is bigger than that of 2015 and again was bigger than that of 2014 (based on steamspy stats and event population estimates). If the game was not fun then people would not stick around long-term. How many other games do you still play regularly after 3-4 years? Even with great titles most people move on after a few months.
Instead the only people who play MWO and stay are long time BT fans or people who have sunk a large amount of money into it (whales).
Again pure conjecture with no evidence to back this up.
Rather than focusing on a long term strategy of making a solid and fun game that people want to play, they choose instead to farm the whales by releasing more mech packs for easy money, no thought or design involved just more reskins of the same old shit with maybe some OP quirks.
Games need income to survive and as long as the population keeps asking for mechs then this is a valid way of achieving that. However that aside most of the claims here are just pure BS. Its pretty obvious that a lot of work goes into the design of each mech and they are not simple reskins. In fact a lot of love and care goes into to make sure they stay true to the btech originals while actually making them look good.
Furthermore the game has made significant improvements each year in terms of balance, content and game modes. There can be no argument that it is a far better game now than it was in 2013. and if we compared MWO with other games in the genre (world of tanks, world of warships, armored warfare, war thunder, etc), it doesn't come out too badly in terms of content even though it has by far the smallest developer.
The game still needs work but complaining about things that don't need to complained about just means that the games real issues (of which they are many) get ignored even more.