As title explains, ED have decided to encrypt and hide almost all the .LUA files, so modding is essentially dead. Why you ask? Because of "cheating"...

I'm not sure what this "popular demand" is all about, smells like BS to me to be quite frank. In the fifteen plus years playing DCS/LOMAC I've never come across anyone cheating online, nor have I spoken to anyone who's ever complained about it. With things as they are now, the A-4 Skyhawk community mod would be impossible, and it's hard to know how this will effect it going forward. Really idiotic and tone deaf move from ED here, incredibly disappointed. They nerf missiles to ahistorical ranges to encourage more merges because "it's more fun" and seem to miss the entire reason why many of us fly DCS in the first place... for the realism. If I just wanted to bomb around in jets and have a laugh I'd stick to Ace Combat.

Statements like this don't help either, not professional at all imo:

Wow... I thought it was just the lua files for the V1 buzz bomb on the channel map. Looks like it's for all weapons systems?

They didnt kill modding, they killed the ability to create or modify weapons systems. Very nearly every weapon system (read bomb, missile etc) is already in the game. Having some oversight in how each system works I dont see as necessarily a bad thing. 

The only aspect of the A4 it would have killed was the HARM as that was new to DCS.  

Ok, I might have overestimated the impact of it on further reading. I still think its pretty unecessary, and I stand by the point I've never witnessed or known anyone complain about cheating in DCS in over a decade of play. It will hamper some mod programs that wish to create new weapons to go with them for offline play. I was quite interested in the F-35 mod, looks like a bit of harmless fun alongside the F-22.