i was wondering, why this project needs to be bound with the wog patch? no offense to wog as it is great, but why isnt it possible be able to opt for not including wog files? if the problem is that we have not reversed engineered the archiver of the game (the way the homm3 files are zipped and then read), y not try to do this or request the archivers’ code from the wog team?i think this particular source code should not be kept as a secret, as it’s the base to everything (and it is used by other communities like this one widely)
hey, *.lod archive format is reversed correctly
the only not reversed format is *.gm? saves, but vcmi has its own save format
most of files from wog are just put into game archives plainly, or put as loose files
the only thing from wog which is secret to us is the source code of patches to heroes3.exe when it become h3wog.exe, but because VCMI and HOMM3 are diffrent internally it would be not so much help (except some mathematical formulas used for calculating things).
the reason why wog is needed is because it have to has base files and the aim of project is make heroes3 clone which is easily moddable so no doubt it has respect to WoG, the mod to heroes3 which were done whithout source code using hackish tricks.
VCMI from WoG inherits directly only data - features are rewritten.
I did. I even got invited to the WoG Team and was kindly granted with access to the sources of programs handling H3 files what helped us much back then. 
As Majaczek said, everything except save games is currently supported by VCMI. Our source code for that is publicly available for years, I’m not sure why do you think there is something kept secret?
As for the main question, it has been raised many times.
Basically, we chose to base on WoG because it has more features and is base for a vast majority of modding initiatives. WoG has its limitations and our primary goal is to lift them and to allow better, more customizable and rich game experience.
However we are aware that there are players who prefer vanilla H3 gameplay rules and do not like WoG novelties. They probably won’t be interested in VCMI’s mod-support. However, they may want to use VCMI because of other improvements we’ve made: higher resolutions support, GUI improvements (like stack queue), native availability on other platforms. We hear their voice loud and clear and we will eventually remove necessity of having WoG game data. This is however not priority now: VCMI is in alpha stage and still misses some important features of the original game. It is aimed to testers and developers, not casual player. I believe that necessity of having WoG data files is not a real trouble for them.
IM not implying anything at all, im on your side! as a new member in this project i just wanted to grab the philosophy of the project, from a programmer’s view and have a sneak peak at the hierarchy of actions. From your sayings, i have been covered.
Let’s all try to make it beta as soon as possible then. 
Oh, I like this enthusiasm! Welcome aboard