yes, in some cases we request help by the community, remember we were looking for voice actors for beta 3 some time ago? it was a great success, i think nearly 40 people sent their voice sets to me.
the biggest problem is coordination in an open project, think of i would request some texture for a scout of race x. should i do that as some kind of competition, then i will get like 5 texture sets and after that 4 ppl upset that their texture was not choosen. the other way would be to assign tasks to people, the problem with that is that not everybody has the same level of quality doing there work, like for example a dominion fighter would look awesome while it's carrier looks like a pink pig.
still, we try to leave the mod as open as possible to be influenced by the community but too open is problematic as too closed is.

hehe, i am sure eufnoc already forgot about that thread anyway i just missed that topic unread a while ago