How long are you going to make your posts exactly? The more you dilute the argument and split them, the more you miss the point:
- Elite: Dangerous has a 32 player limit, which is definitely
not massive. We've seen many action games with bigger player counts. Why? Well, because those games have dedicated servers and don't use P2P technology. It's not a technical limitation, it's a design limitation.
- Elite: Dangerous restricts players from communicating together, doesn't help players meet and play together, and supports no real group activity, making it
barely multiplayer: several people playing alone in their own corner of the same room isn't really multiplayer.
- Elite: Dangerous is certainly
online though, but that's it.
The fact that there's a "grey area" doesn't change much, ED is far from it, and a simple comparison with games commonly accepted as being "MMOs" shows how different it is from those. Even Guild Wars which fits in this grey area isn't really a MMO, so how could ED be one?
Regardless, the exact definition of what constitutes a "MMO" is pretty much defined by the people, and judging by this thread alone, it seems ED isn't one in its current state. If you want to go looking for the original meaning, it was coined by Richard Gariott, who defined it as a game that uses a large number of players to create a massive variety of encounters, form massive societies, and take part in massive activities. See, things haven't really changed, albeit it's been simplified to "lots of players, lots of interactions, group mechanics, group activities".
Your own definition is: "a MMO is whatever game calls itself that, regardless of the number of players as long as it can be called 'large', even though it has no massively oriented multiplayer mechanics, BUT GOD IT NEEDS A PERSISTENT WORLD". I'll stick to mine.