I suppose I should mention that, perhaps contrary to my statements above, I don't consider customizing your HUD to be cheating --
as long as you aren't customizing such that you are giving yourself information that you wouldn't otherwise have with the default arrangement.
1. Modifying the game (externally) to give yourself an advantage (no matter how slim) is cheating.
By your own self-conflicting logic, modifying the autogen.cfg file is cheating... etc.
I suppose I should have clarified that statement further: I meant any modifications made externally that cannot be made internal to the game (in our case, console commands). Autogen.cfg can be modified fully in-game (AFAIK).
Custom HUD's cannot, for example, force-enable the human radar effect, despite what you may have heard to the contrary.
No, modifying the client-side executable to force the 'helmet radar' on all the time is the same amount of effort, and the same type of cheat, as an aimbot.
Admittedly, I was unaware of the required changes that needed to be made to make this change happen. However, since the executable requires changing, does that mean that sv_pure=1 servers wouldn't allow radar cheaters to connect? (Purely a question, I really don't know.)
Think of it this way: Let's pretend...
Except the crosshair isn't slightly up and left of the center of the screen. This argument is what is known as a 'moving the goalpost' falacy.
What I was getting at here was that to someone who has, for example, never played an FPS before would find it just as difficult to accurately use the centre of the screen without a crosshair as a seasoned gamer would if the target area were not the centre. I also think your interpretation of the "Moving goalpost" fallacy is a bit too literal. That fallacy refers to using the argument that "my way is right because you can't provide enough evidence to prove that your way is right," e.g., religious arguments.
Modifying the HUD files to add/remove a crosshair, or any other visual decoration, is an ability the Tremulous developers specifically added to the game. They chose to make the HUD able to be modified and customized.
The point here is not that the HUD is allowed to be customized, because you're right, it is, but whether or not adding a crosshair is cheating. I posit that it is cheating because it gives the player information that he would otherwise technically not have without the addition. Something as practically insignificant as a dot (well, four dots since resolutions are evenly divisible in both dimensions and have no single pixel centre... but splitting hairs aside now) indicating the centre of the screen is still cheating if only because it indicates where your attack is aimed. A dot on the upper right corner is insignificant since it has no meaning in game.
2. Binds are not cheating. These can be added in game and are used by the UI to set preferences, ...
So setting r_picmip 7, r_gamma 5, r_mapoverbrightbits 4, r_intensity 0.5, r_vertexlighting, ...
I'm not as well versed when it comes to the specifics of the Q3 engine but it seems to me that if you want everything to be bright that's ok. Trem was not built to have dark areas that can conceal stalking aliens and whatnot which is
one of the reasons, IIRC, that flashlights have been vetoed.
Finally, the devs have stated (or people have stated on behalf of the devs) that next update we'll have alien crosshairs by default. For now we do not.
