I think opportunity cost is well worth mentioning, but I don’t know that I think it’s as high as you believe it to be.
Choosing someone who has been around a while is optional. The value of having an experienced community member do it is built-in trust, access, and understanding. The costs are the writer’s time (though that cost is decreasing as more people start writing about EA professionally) and the time of those being interviewed. I would also note that while there’s lots of work for technical people in EA, writers in the community may not have found such great opportunities for impact.
Having a relative outsider take on the project would add objectivity, as Dylan noted. Objectivity would both improve credibility to outsiders and increase that likelihood of robust criticism being made. I also think there are just a lot of pretty great writers in the world who might find EA interesting. Perhaps you just get different benefits from different types of writers.
There’s a cost to waiting as well. The longer you wait, the more likely it is that important parts of the story will be forgotten or deleted.
I think opportunity cost is well worth mentioning, but I don’t know that I think it’s as high as you believe it to be.
Choosing someone who has been around a while is optional. The value of having an experienced community member do it is built-in trust, access, and understanding. The costs are the writer’s time (though that cost is decreasing as more people start writing about EA professionally) and the time of those being interviewed. I would also note that while there’s lots of work for technical people in EA, writers in the community may not have found such great opportunities for impact.
Having a relative outsider take on the project would add objectivity, as Dylan noted. Objectivity would both improve credibility to outsiders and increase that likelihood of robust criticism being made. I also think there are just a lot of pretty great writers in the world who might find EA interesting. Perhaps you just get different benefits from different types of writers.
There’s a cost to waiting as well. The longer you wait, the more likely it is that important parts of the story will be forgotten or deleted.