Money changes hands for "pre-order bonuses" and "deluxe edition content" too, but developers still later bundle all that together and sell it to anyone else who wants it as a DLC pack or in a "complete edition" game-of-the-year release or whatever they call it, sometimes only six months or a year after the original release.
Yes - the exact wording matters. For the Cobra IV it was
"Existing players will also unlock the exclusive Cobra Mk IV ship in Elite Dangerous: Horizons. The Cobra Mk IV will be available in the game only to players who joined us in the first year – forever. It’s our ‘thank you’ for your faith in the game, and you’ll see more of the Cobra Mk IV in Friday’s Peek Of The Week."
which is
considerably more specific than a lot of the things which get waved around as "but Frontier promised" and I don't see any loopholes in that "only" and "forever".
Whereas, for example, for Odyssey they'd made the wording the simpler "Both pre-order packs grant access to the exclusive Pioneer suit skin as a pre-order bonus." which doesn't at all rule out selling it to other people under other arrangements later, and most other things claimed as "promises" are either solely about future plans (no money changes hands) or about the situation at time of writing (with no explicit statement that it won't change later)
I'm not seeing the difference. Those players still had the content exclusively for the time inbetween. Giving it to new people almost TEN YEARS later doesn't seem to be much of an issue.
I don't personally care, certainly. But I can't speak for anyone except myself on that, and there'd be around 750,000 people based on Frontier's published sales figures who might think differently.
From what I can gather, much of what was promised to the original kickstarter backers STILL hasn't been delivered, and never will be.
Tricky one that. What was
promised in a financial sense was the contents of the reward tiers, and I think all of those were delivered.
That the Elite Dangerous we get to play isn't
exactly like the one imagined in 2012 ... well, we didn't strictly speaking pay for those, and there were enough "concept" or "prototype" disclaimers on most of it to not require any specific timescales.
("offline mode", which was something they were a bit more definite on, they
did refund on request for once it became clear they couldn't do that)
(although I would suggest not promising things you're not sure you can actually deliver would be a good start to avoiding the problem).
They've got a lot better at that nowadays, certainly. The Frontier of 2012-2015ish especially was
very naive about a lot of things - running an MMO, the nature of the ED communities, their own ability to deliver technically on the originally-planned timescale, etc. - and let their own enthusiasm (in those days, they didn't have community managers do most of the talking) get them to be rather more definitive about things than was in any way wise. (And it has certainly been a gradual process of improvement after that, too)
They'd never say something as definitive as the Cobra Mk IV thing nowadays, but they did back then and now they're stuck with it.
...
I even bought the old Powerplay decal set but unfortunately the faction I'm most interested in is brand new. I'll most likely have to get the new decal set just to get that particular one 
