Nobody has ever said, nor can I imagine anyone saying, that they flat out don’t want mod tools (quite the opposite in fact, it’s a regular topic of discussion). It’s not even a matter of processing power, even though the rigs we use are constantly upgraded, and the Frostbite devs burn out graphics card on a weekly basis.
The issue is pretty straight forward, though complicated and difficult to address. Frostbite is extremely complicated and relies on a lot of licensed technologies that are not easily (even by throwing lots of money at them) re-licensed for public consumption. This is further compounded by the fact that it’s not a single editor, and thus can’t be released as an easy-install do-everything package.
Can it be made into such a package? Of course, anything is possible, but the time frame and resources required for it is pretty tremendous. The package would then also have to be maintained, documented, have very thorough testing, and some level of support provided. The game would also have to have mod endpoints to support custom packages being added to it, as well as ways to ensure anti-cheat and such are handled properly. We’d probably also want to make sure there’s an easy and convenient way to distribute and maintain these mods, similar to Steam Workshop, where authors can upload their creations, receive comments, ratings, etc. The server software would also have to be upgraded to support these mods, followed by updating the backend to allow searching and finding of these servers, plus provide a way for server owners to actually load the content into their server as currently our ToS does not allow any viewing/editing/modifying of the server files.
It’s not a simple thing as just dumping all our internal tools and letting people figure things out. I don’t think anybody thinks that our tools are beyond the comprehension of everyone, because we obviously use it, and we are all human (last I checked anyways..). But there is a massively steep learning curve because they are just that, dev tools.
I’ll give you an example. I wanted to play around a bit with making a map and poke around Frostbite’s internals and see what kind of cool map I could make. I used to do maps for older games (AvP2, Starcraft, Bf1942), so I figured “can’t be that hard”. I never even got to the point of creating a basic empty map before being completely overwhelmed with the amount of options, programs, and data required to begin work before I had to give up and go bother some of the senior mappers and get a crash course on everything I needed to know to set things up. I’m sure I could have figured it out eventually, but the steep entry bar could easily turn away some otherwise fantastic community mappers just because they didn’t have the time available to learn things.
So to summarize, yes, anything is possible given enough time and resources, but in order to release good tools that would benefit the community and really bring out the amazing talent you guys have, an enormous amount of work would be needed to get everything set up properly to enable you guys to really shine (and this isn’t counting the legal and licensing barriers either). Work would also have to be done in order to not release the game source with it, while still making the build process ensure that the maps load as quickly as the game base assets, which is no small feat, and ensuring the servers are stable and everyone is able to enjoy them fully.
tl;dr: It’s a tremendous undertaking