Ok I'll bite:
What they have shown at gamescom and citizenzon could've been made by a competent team in under a year. Yes they have more than a year's worth of assets in their repository (and it speaks volumes about their professionalism that they just seem to ship all the assets in the download regardless of how finished they are, or whether they are even used!), but the content and functionality shown are less than a year's worth of work. Now you may say they needed time to build the team and whatnot, fine, add another 6 months on top.
Remember Duke Nukem Forever? Remember how people defended it saying how genre-defying it was gonna be? Remember how the studio that was essentially wasting the money and producing a brown generic FPS, then scrapping it and building another, and another. They bumbled around from 1997 to 2009, when money finally ran out. Then Gearbox came and made the game in a little over a year. It wasn't a great game, but at least it was functional.
Running a business to produce something like SC is a complex undertaking, and anyone who tries to simplify that into a few dot points of criticism based on hearsay should be ignored.
But nobody is doing that. What people are doing is point to specific issue with the way the project is set up, technology choices, and overall responsibility. Yes that's a list of bullet points, but that doesn't make said list irrelevant or less true. And good chunks of the complexity is self-inflicted: No backer told Chris Roberts to form several separate development studios which work independently and then have to somehow merge their work with each other. That was a bad decision and I was critical of it from day one. The first time I heard about this I said that this runs the risk of ending in a mess.
The choice of technology is also self inflicted, everyone with experience in CE knows that it's not the first choice for a space game, and it's gonna take a lot of work to make that work in AAA quality, let alone BOTH FPS and space flight. There's also significantly less experienced CE developers out there than for other engines. They made their own bed, now they have to sleep in it.
The ship concept sales produce additional development effort that has to be factored in, essentially increasing the total amount of work. Yes it brings in money, but does it bring in more money than those ships cost to make? And as someone who doesn't buy them, why do I have to take the time hit on the main game's completion date?
It's not beyond the realms of possibility that Chris Roberts is an arrogant, perfectionist, autocratic micro-manager with an inability to meet deadlines, but I don't think he's a con-man or that any development problems they may be having were anticipated and covered up.
I think he's just not a good project manager. And everything I see coming out of their offices corroborates that.
I would not trust Derek Smart to tell me that it was daytime if we were standing outside on a sunny day. His motivations for this whole situation are utterly self-serving.
Perhaps. But again, does that invalidate the points he raised? Not in and by itself, no. Some of his statements are speculations. Others turned out to be fact already. Are we to ignore those because of who he is and what his motives may be?
