The game is set 10 years prior to JA2. Both would've been teenagers.

I miss some of my favourites, too. :-( We should make a mod that brings all the known mercs, canonical or not, into the game to give everyone their favourite mercs back. Of course we have to be able to give them their original voices first, otherwise they are going to be really boring (they would be a bit anyway since we can't give them all the interactions (yet)). I wouldn't mind giving that a try once I have some more time and the voice files are accessible again.

JA:F "Kid Mercenary" Edition :)

Yea, except voices, which had to be reintegrated in the Unity assets, the rest should be easy moddable. So a merc pack is do-able.

But imho the priority now is to re-asses the mercs we have, since while FC did a pretty good job statistically (I've checked a few mercs against JA2 stats and they are correct), they are not balanced gameplay wise. 

Also, fixing the merc specialities should be a priority.

Mechanics and medics need way better bonuses. We need to explore the perks FC put in and see if we can't have dedicated "spotter/scout" mercs - this is in JA:F is a great thing to have. Also melee needs to become viable. And finally, the militia training perk needs to be explored - since we lack merc2merc training. Thus the final jobs will look like:

Marksman

Spotter

Night Ops

Melee/Brawler

Medic

Mechanic

Militia Trainer

anything I misse?

I'll make you an offer - I'll work on adding all the mercs and you work on balancing them. ;-)

Well, I wouldn't make them kids. ;-) It won't make much sense timeline wise, but you can't have both, so people are going to have to decide whether they want the mercs to be realistic (age wise, not to mention all of them being on the island somehow :D) or want to use their favourites.

We could make 2 mods - one with just the mercs that could somehow be there (possibly with a little quest added to it that shows what reason they have to be there), and one with those plus everyone that couldn't possibly be there for those that don't care about the timeline.
Hey, we could add a time travel quest where you can get your favourite mercs from the future. We just need to make sure that future Ivan doesn't touch his younger self and destroys the universe. :D

I definitely agree about melee. I would love a pure melee/stealth merc to be a viable option. Stealthing JAF like Splinter Cell would be fun as hell. :-)
We also need more doctors. They are not as important as they were in JA2, but only one starting merc being good with medical (and even he isn't fantastic) is not enough.

If I remember correctly, all the details about the perks are in the JSON files, so modding them shouldn't be a problem.

Marksman needs to be split up (or rather added to it) into long-range and short-range (Sniper, SMG specialist, shotgun specialist,?anything else?). If we add explosive weapons, we need those as well. Other than that, I think you got it covered.
I also think that the perks should have a bit more of an effect, since they seem the only real reason to level up now. You should really feel how much more powerful the merc is in his field now and using a merc with a certain perk should make quite a difference to not having the perk.

Not sure whether that's possible, but I would also prefer the perks to be choosable to some extent. It wouldn't make much sense for Shadow to become a mechanic or explosives expert, but being able to choose between several perks that fit the character would be great. Just something to think about for the (probably far) future.

I would love to have more JA1 only mercs, dont care if there are more from JA2. Probably harder to implement with the voices and all but could be cool.

There are a lot mercs that never made it to JA2.

I looked it up and from the 60 JA1 mercs 29 didnt made i too JA2 plus four that were Deadly Games only. So i see a potential of 33 "new" mercs.

In JAF we can get 27 mercs plus 4 old ones that are only Quest Characters. 13 of the 27 are also in JA2 and JA1, two were introduced in JA2 and the rest are new.