After the 3.4 release, all aircraft that are now on SVN (non-base package aircraft) will be removed from fgdata.
I'm not confused about where to get the latest version - it's a question of threshold. Let's take the case at hand. I get a report about problems with a specific aircraft, so the natural thing to do is take a quick look myself. I actually don't want necessarily the latest version here, I just want a working version to see where the view points.
For aircraft part of FGData, all it takes for me is to fire up FG and see. But with aircraft moved out, I'd now need to download and install the SVN package. Now, it's a weekend and I'm at home with a GSM modem connection, the P-51D is a substantial resource hog on GIT with 1.1 GB (not sure if it's much smaller on SVN), at good days I get 100 kbit/sec over the GSM, but today is heavy snowfall so I expect perhaps 15 kbit/sec, so the threshold changed from suddenly changed from just trying to a few hours download.
Which probably means I won't automatically test whether things work with aircraft which aren't in the base package in the future unless I happen to like them and have them installed anyway - there's just too much overhead to manage yet another repo.
By the way tested the /sim/current-view/ stuff and it was working as expected (IE. that values changed as I panned the view around or adjusted the zoom level).
So you see the properties change, but you don't see the light remain where it should be?? I'm royally confused.
What happens if you change
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<view_pitch_offset><use>/sim/current-view/pitch-offset-deg</use></view_pitch_offset>
in Effects/terrain-default.eff into
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<view_pitch_offset>20.0</view_pitch_offset>
(the landing light lightspots should be displaced from the searchlight - in other words, is the problem reading the property, or is it passing its value through to the shader).
Too bad really since landing lights would be very useful for night operations but at least some aircraft will now have the ability to add landing lights with minimal frame rate impact. So it is a step forward even if it does not work for my aircraft.
Admittedly I still fail to see why. If I can't see the runway during approach, it's sort of irrelevant whether it is illuminated or not. And if I can see it, it's somewhere in the lower half of the screen - and the landing light is designed to be somewhere in the lower half of the screen.
So even if your default view is pointed to the sky for a normal approach for whatever reason, you might still easily define a dedicated landing view where the view axis is just where it needs to be to see the runway in the lower half of the screen.
Only a case where you need the upper half of the screen illuminated would be a bit tricky to handle - but I doubt any plane does that.