I will be very dissapointed if ArmA 3 goes the direction of DayZ. DayZ is still an extension of ArmA's engine, and in my opinion, the engine with it's base features such as the 3D editor, should be of first priority. It would only make sense if you perfected the engine before you thought about a mod for it, so to avoid what happened to DayZ itself, where the mod was quite decent, but was marred by programming issues.

Hell, DayZ may have been created using the editor first. I strongly believe that the engine and it's features, and also the original game should be worked on first before DayZ, because when programming for the original game and the engine, both ArmA 3 and DayZ benefit. However, cutting time out of ArmA 3 and the engine features itself doesn't benefit ArmA 3; only DayZ.