Just for the record, I don't like the "official" box design. FittyTuck's black version with the Julia silhouette, eyes, action in the background, etc, gets my vote.
That said, I'll provide a little insight from my job that might help to explain why we're being told the "box is final". I think even if Sierra/VUG wanted to change the box art that would probably mean that their targeted ship date would have to slip in order to make it happen.
I work for a large consumer products company that makes a lot of very popular household products. More than likely, you've used some of them. Many of these products are packaged in flashy, plastic film packaging or glossy, printed cardboard boxes. I know from various new product launches that I've worked on that the process to actually CHANGE the packaging is usually a 10 to 12 week minimum. It boils down to a few things: (1) Your company is usually not the one printing/producing your packaging, so there's the delay in working through another company that is making your packaging for you; (2) If these boxes are produced anything like the packages I've worked on, the actual industrial process that is used to make the packaging is pretty intricate, so that if you change the appearance of the packaging you have to fabricate new printing plates from scratch, and that takes time because those plates are high-precision, very expensive pieces of equipment - the boxes aren't being printed on some dude's laser printer in his garage; (3) You have to deal with the bureaucracy of big business. Any change of this magnitude would require the seal of approval from multiple layers of management. Probably in this case, if Sierra/VUG has already sunk money into printing up a batch of boxes for launch, they are probably talking about eating around 1/4 to 1/2 a million dollars if they already printed the boxes. They would have to scrap all those boxes, possibly delay the ship date, and dole out another chunk of cash to print up the new box. At the end of the day, Sierra/VUG are in this to make as much money as possible out of this, and their top decision-makers would have to be convinced that scrapping the box and starting over is going to put them out ahead of where they would be if they did nothing.
But having said all that, I hope they change the box art. Even if it delays the ship date, in the end I think it would be worth it. The current box is so bad I don't see how it's supposed to have any shelf appeal to fuel an impulse purchase or lure in the gamer that has no idea what Tribes is about.
For the love of the game, change the box!
PS:
A question for the folks at Sierra/VUG: Was the box design ever tested in focus groups? If so, I'd recommend your marketing folks take your version of the box and some of the versions that the community came up with, present them to a panel of gamers that know very little about the Tribes series, and see which box design convinces them to spend $50 to try the game.
