Another optional sugestion: make some community tilesets as official (for example, Mad Mike's Big City; NameZ's rivers and Highspeed etc.)

The devs do like to add tiles that really fit the game's style and lore, but the devs can't model as far as I know so they mostly rely on the community to make said models (which is fine by the way, it's a really nice way to involve community). We just need people to make such tiles, and due to the small playerbase, people like these are scarce. So yeah, they want it too, just need people to make 'em. I kinda understand how you feel mods are uncomfortable as players need to subscribe to it additionally to play the map, but consider that huge chuck of the game's charm is the excellent mod support, so I would personally make use of it.