If I may?
The DDF did not get "carried away" (okay, maybe we did a bit sometimes, but we were often asked to by Frontier

), and we didn't realise that the implication of what we were concerned about would be that the code would all be moved serverside & we'd have the situation we have now. We just trusted Frontier to handle it.
Everyone (to my knowledge) used their own funds to be part of the DDF... we didn't use funds "from all the backers".
As for myself, I was only really interested in playing offline for the most part, but when the topics came up - I tried to put myself in the position of someone who was interested primarily in the online version, because that was an important part of the game & the hardest to get right. The potential for screw ups in the online portion is far more wide ranging than the offline portion. The whole point of the discussions was to try and find holes in FD's designs & offer suggestions to make the experience better for
all.
In retrospect, I feel a bit silly for not noticing this (as a software dev myself) but it never occurred to any of us that offline would be scrapped as a result. It does kind of prove the adage though that sometimes the best place to hide something is in plain sight.