Long time lurker, but this thread has made me sign up. My first post, so go easy.
I've owned all the GT games, but when I saw that Forza 2 had a livery editor, I went out and bought a copy. In time, I became hooked to the painting aspect which has kept me interested in the game for longer than the racing element would have held me.
I soon got to grips with the editor and was making some reasonable paint jobs (I prefer race livery and replicas over the thousands of Manga cars out there).
What I soon discovered was there was a huge and vibrant community of like-minded people out there who enjoyed the same aspect of the game as I did. I'm not the quickest of racers, but found painting to be my forte.
Before long, I was selling my 'paints' online and eventually to tuning garages. These are groups of like-minded people who have got together to paint, tune and test cars for anyone to buy in the auction house and marketplace. Some tuning garages started to get reputations for producing highly revered cars and their liveries. If anyone has been involved with the FM2 community, they'll know about the original MSpeed skyline and the Yellowshark.
Eventually, these tuning garages would release cars that were highly anticipated and gathered significant interest from the rest of the community.
Anyway, what I am trying to say is, that because of these tuning garages, brought like-minded people together to do what they love the most. Enjoy the full experience of this game that they shared and to share their works of art with everyone else.
Also, many competitions are run, solely for paint jobs. You only have to look at the designs
here to see some of the T10-sanctioned competiton winners liveries. I had the fortune to win a couple of these events. Again... it's prolonged my enjoyment of the game painting and competing in a different way rather than just on the track... more so than I thought it ever would.
Here are a couple of examples of my work. One released with a tuning garage and the other a paint replica competition winner.
I would love GT5 to have a paint editor included. Imagine opening up a tuning garage with some mates, either that you know personally or online (90% of my friends on Xbox are from Forza3 and I've never met them in real life). It's also great for race-teams to all have the same livery when racing online (It's easy to swap liveries between friends).
I've said to my mate that we should open up a garage. I'd do the paints and he works on the tunes. Then being able to sell these creations via an auction house can only benefit those who purchase the cars.
Yes - there is a lot of kak out there, but the majority on here are serious and dedicated to GT5, thus having an addition of a paint editor for the reasons I've mentioned above can only help this game, and community, flourish.
Sorry for the long-winded post and I hope you catch my drift.