Wow, that degenerated fast...
Before anyone starts ripping on me, I'll say I'm not purely a WC fan. I'm a fan of space sims. WC is/was an exceptional space sim series that pulled you in via its characters and the audacity of the enemies you were fighting. The draw of the X-Wing series was the ability to fly in the SW universe. Freespace tried to be something completely different, and it did manage this, but it didn't truly pull it off till the second game. True, you don't really meet/care about any of the characters, and there's no draw to an as yet unseen universe, but it did have it's draw: plot twists out the wazoo. I thought they were intelligent, sometimes scary, twists that made the fight a whole new ballgame, something you rarely, if ever, saw in the other two series. Traps, for instance, were fairly easy to spot in the WC/XW games simply by the brevity of the briefings. Freespace, and its sequel (moreso its sequel), showed that it was a dynamic universe, and that wierd things could happen really fast, thereby changing the whole mission and making the briefing moot. I also don't think the FS games were in any way a WC 'ripoff.' Professing that is simply being childish. As I mentioned in my previous post, there are only so many things you can do with a space sim. Teaming up with a previous enemy to fight a far-advanced foe is a pretty standard issue conflict.
Sales aside, I think all three of the series I mentioned were good solid game series that don't deserved to be trashed and squabbled about, but seen for what is good about them.
But, again: What do I know?