We first started to make this for Scorched Earth in the very early days of AAA, there was nothing else around to do that at the time. That was even pre-the AAA installer or whatever it was called, we did this simply because to play scorched earth a number of people all had to have identical installations so we made a combined installation with a simple installer.
To my knowledge UP didn't exist at that point, certainly TD didn't. There is no conspiracy, we simply get along ok with some people in TD by this point (as we do with some people on SAS) which is not surprising really as we share the same hobby and love historic aircraft and aviation and have the same goal, to try to make il2 better.
We continue to make HSFX because some of us enjoy doing it and at the time that we started doing it nothing else was around that did what we want..(and for seow specifically there still isn't, because many of hsfx features are specifically tailored to work with that.)
TD 4.11 conspiracy ?. If they wanted to do that they could have changed a lot of things to make it impossible to mod il2 but at this point TD are deliberately leaving the game open, as they will be with 4.12. many of the people are the same people and also play multiple game versions like everybody else.