I appreciate OP taking the time to pass along some of his knowledge and experience to some of us noobs in this thread (I'm not being sarcastic). I have mentors in other areas of endeavor, and yet, here I have acted as though this was unncessary. We have a saying, "never do something for the first time, without getting good counsel". Even though this is a gaming community, it also remains true that anything worth doing is worth doing well. OP has provided some excellent points to consider; have you really thought them through?
Having said that, I have a single concern at the moment: even if the community can finally step up to the plate, and deliver some of the things that only they can be responsible for, if OP is no longer going to be admin for SWAT/CF, how will the administrative aspects of these changes get done, or be maintained? The updates needed on the RRS for instance, or finishing the repairs to some of the lost features of the forum? Is XL going to do the needed admin changes, or do we just accept that the CF mod and forum are as complete as they are ever going to be? If this is the case, then it seems illogical for people to make the effort required to produce the desired changes, because they would have no expectation of seeing these changes made "permanent" by inclusion into their respective parts of SWAT.