I see. I would say most players saw it as a success, probably because of the faster turnaround on new content.
With regards to splitting the community, I think this could be improved going forward. The primary reason to play the community mod (at least early on) was because of its bugfix for the Han farming techs. Because of this, the community mod became the default version of the game for a large group of players. So, subsequent versions were heavily vetted with voting to ensure only guaranteed improvements were merged. What resulted was in my eyes, a much less ambitious version compared to the possibilities the community mod provides.
My thoughts are if the mod adopts a more experimental approach, like a community test environment, the majority of games will take place on a27, with those curious to try out new content playing occasionally on the mod.
With this more experimental approach, both players and contributors should be more welcoming to ambitious content, which may be imbalanced, or otherwise sub-optimal. The "risk" of playing the mod would be that some things may be bad changes and some may be great changes, and to avoid this risk, I imagine players would prefer vanilla 0ad rather than playing the community mod alone.