I don't believe it. I just don't.

Good news if true.

it is true. www.reddit.com/r/tribes spend their whole day arguing about disk damage, chaingun spread and falloff, perks and whatnot since apparently, the small team dedicated to working on the update actually seem to listen to the community for once.
However, as someone with ~700hrs in both tribes and quake I'm not interested in it until they add strafejumping and replace the inventory station with quake style items. The current gameplay is just too shallow.

How big is the tribes community these days?

smaller than ql, 150 concurrent players or so