I think what we want is a ruleset that is playable out of the box with no inconsistencies and no errata and that holds as far as possible to the laws of physics.
CT+ may be the way, but we'd want it published nicely with good production values and an 'official' stamp. House rules are all well and good but it seems Traveller has always required house rules just to be minimally playable.
We all like the core concepts of Traveller else we wouldn't all still be here (I see these as Prior History and generalist skillsets, for the most part, with a hard-headed conservative bent when it comes to future history and technology), but not one version has achieved a completely usable system.
CT had it all there but was compromised by some lazy fudging (ship design, world generation) and inconsistent chargen (Bk4 etc compared to COTI)
MT just complicated matters with an unneccessarily arcane Task system and skill bloat, even before the controversy over the setting.
I've not seen TNE (there's only so many pdf's one can buy) but from what I can gather it changed the fundamental system along with trying to rationalise the post-cyberpunk technology.
T4 was again over complicated, and has some very awkward rule systems, along with atrocious production values and the least interesting setting.
Hate GURPS, but the campaign resources are good. Just very hard ot convert back into CT/T20 if you don't speak GURPS (and not willing to learn)
T20 is a successful iteration, with the central core concepts of Traveller translated into D20 as far as they go, along with some great D20 innovations (such as the armour rule). The problem here is that Prior History is almost incompatible with D20 style advancement - it's a reet bugger to juggle and calculate all those skill points. I have great mental arithmentic but the tally of skill points the pc should have with whats marked down on the sheet never seem to match. There's almost too many choices, and I often end up with a character quite different from what I first envisaged.
Btw, one way around this is to use the expanded CT prior history tables for the careers that have them instead of the T20 ones, to get more detail (for instance, Commando school can denote multiclassing into Mercenary, and Intelligence school Rogue).
A second issue is the surprising lack of depth in the OTU. Having collected the reprints, then T4 and MT, I see a huge amount of data just reprinted. There seems to be a deep reluctance to embellish and develope the setting. Instead we have pages and pages of more or less worthless UWPs (the biggest rules error ever in Traveller).
GT has at least added detail and richness to the setting, and Avenger's sourcebooks have at last done the same within a CT/T20 framework. Notice that MJD has concentrated on District 268, which is the almost the only interesting subsector in nigh on 30 years of published material.
What I'd like to see is CT+ worked up into a publishable pdf (complete with artowrk). I'd also like to see a proper consistent chargen, more detailed than basic but not as complicated as the expanded tables, with 18 careers listed (see list below). I have some ideas on this. A proper world generation ruleset (over to you Mal), and crucially a comprehensive weapons and armour table on a single (or double) page. No referencing half a dozen books for a short firefight.
Alot of those CT weapon rules were alot more complicated than they needed to be, and lookup tables slow down combat.
Careers list: Army, Navy, Marine, Scout, Merchant, Rogue, Technician, Colonist, Belter, Traveller, Bureaucrat, Field Scientist (inc. Medic), Academic, Noble, Barbarian, Professional (like lawyer, teacher, businessman etc), Entertainer/Sportsophont, Law Enforcer.
