[DISCUSSION] Medical Pharmacy vs. Chemistry

[FireKestrel]

We want to try a thing out before reverting it, and there have been several patches already to address things brought up. The underlying problem of chemistry not supplying medical with chemicals is unresolved. Some of the issues in this thread need to be resolved regardless of whether we keep or ditch the pharmacist.

I think labelling all this as stubborn is over the top. Equally as frustrating is attempts to shut down changes before they have been given a chance to settle.

If chemistry not supplying medical is the absolute underlying issue that these changes is targeting (which was not listed as the reasoning for the original PR), then my view is that I think the team is missing the fact that a large part of this issue stems from medical being overstocked at roundstart. I play doctor a lot, and most rounds I simply don't need to request chemicals from anyone at all because the three nanomeds, lockers full of medkits, port-a-nanomed, port-a-medbay, sleepers, and cryo tubes usually provide enough tools to keep the crew alive for an entire round. Most doctors start the round by printing multiple hypos and filling them with enough chems to tackle any situation, all without anything that a chemistry lab could provide. What chemistry and pharmacists currently provide are chems, that while better, simply don't warrant the extra effort to acquire because the starting supplies are good enough, and can be immediately acquired at roundstart without needing to wait for another player.

But I digress. I don't think making a PR and merging it within 3 hours without any kind of discussion was a healthy move for the game. Ideally there should have been a thread to gage the community's feelings on this issue first, rather than jumping straight to implementation of the development team's idea. Even a surprise testmerge would have felt better. Immediately merging what most players believe was an unfinished PR into main feels permanent, as if the team has already come to a conclusion and won't budge on it. And the request to only use this thread to discuss changes to the current implementation only exacerbated that.