IMO FS is an ever growing community, during the week you can expect to see one or two full servers per night depending on what time you arrive but on a weekend i have seen a lot more activity and more and more each week, the other weekend there was a full 40 player server i believe and ppl still trying to get in so my answer would be yes, FS is still alive and growing!

OK, since you're looking at actually spending money just to get the mod, I'll try to elaborate with a few points on FS:

- It strives to be very true to the movies, and is far more accurate and authentic than most retail SW games, which tend to focus more on including as much content as possible, and don't really spend time on research. As far as I know, an enormous amount of work went into getting FS as accurate as possible.

- It's fairly arcade-based, though no Battlefront 3, and rewards teamwork very generously, I dare say quite a bit more than BF2 and BF2142. If you're an arcade player, though (like most of our community), you can still play and enjoy it.

- It's made up of part space, part planetary combat. The gameplay and vehicle loadout of the huge space maps (a couple are 8x8 kilometers) are based on the X-Wing series of games and revolve mostly around starfighters (think BF1942's Battle of Brtain), with only one of them focusing on capital ships (this map plays like BF1942's Coral Sea, except both sides get a fleet of mobile ships, not a stationary carrier). Staying together is required to make space maps fun and intense - if everyone go lone wolf, they become "random" and frankly pretty boring.

- It has a history of CTD's and server crashes as well as bugs, but these have mostly been sorted out.

- Graphics-wise, expect a high standard that'll demand a tiny bit more of your computer than vanilla BF2142.

- It has new game modes (regular Conquest is done on only one map), so make sure to always read the Game Mode description in loading screens as well as the Briefing. Much has been added and a couple of things have been removed (such as commander abilities, but those may be replaced with new and exciting ones, I'm not sure yet), but I dare say that overall it's a deeper experience than vanilla. A bit tricky to get into, but experiment around and you'll learn soon enough.

Overall, it's a very nice mod, with a small-but-growing community (one to two servers fill up every day) and something I feel you should give a try. After all, BF2142 doesn't really cost that much.

EDIT: Oh, and there are no Jedi. Nor will there ever be, most likely.