I can't find fault with the OP, and have to agree on almost all points.
If anyone stumbles across any of my other posts they'll probably find I sound like a stuck record*, but still. (* Note for moderns: they were like those old 'CD' things your parents used, but bigger.)
I played Elite as a young'un, played Frontier (FE2) on the Amiga, and First Encounters when that came out. Loved all of them. Elite, because it was the first open-world, free-roaming game I'd really played; FE2 and FFE because they made a 'space sim' that actually did - on both counts. FE2 gave us the biggest game world I'd ever seen, and that was on a single floppy disk in 1993. Twenty-two years ago.
And then there was talk of Elite IV.
I could only imagine what that would be like - but what I knew for sure is that it would be awesome. If FE2/FFE were a leap forward from Elite, Elite IV would surely introduce a vastly more detailed game world, and hopefully an even more sophisticated flight simulation to go with it. There'd be more complex interactions with NPCs, plenty of Han Solo/Mal Reynolds-esque stuff to do - or Jack Sparrow-esque, or Marco Polo-esqe, or whoever-the-hell-you-wanted-esque.
We didn't get Elite IV. The way I've come to think of it is that we got Elite One-And-A-Half. Please don't misunderstand me: I'm very well aware that a lot of people have worked very hard indeed on this project, and I'm not going to sit here and say it isn't an impressive achievement. Particularly in terms of some of the visuals, and the sound work that's gone into ED is fantastic. I'm not dissing your game or your work just for the hell of it.
Ooo - plus, the rendering of surrounding stars accurately into the starfield visible in each system? Magnificent.
But...
This isn't what Elite IV could have been. Most of what made FE2 and FFE as great as they were has been stripped out. The first thing to hit me was the flight mechanics: Newtonian scrapped in favour of aeroplane physics - and why? Because combat wasn't exciting enough in FFE. Because fights turned into 'jousts', and that wasn't arcade-fun enough.
Elite - the original - was mostly about fighting; but FE2/FFE were evolving beyond that. Yes, it was still an element, and cropped up occasionally - but there were other ways to play. There were challenges to be had just in learning to fly the ship, to navigate... There was challenge in learning to master the simulation. But no: ED is a combat game. That's the spine of it; the be-all and end-all. If combat isn't exciting enough, the game is a failure. People won't want to play a game that isn't founded on combat, will they?
Nobody ever played Flight Simulator. Nobody ever plays Orbiter, or Pioneer. Nobody plays Euro/American Truck Simulator. Nobody's ever spent hundreds of dollars on DLC for RailWorks.
Before anyone jumps on me for daring to like a different type of game to them, and implying that everyone should only play the games I like... well, yes, I do; but no, I'm not. No, if you like pure-combat space arcade games then that's absolutely fine. But the OP's right: the vision of the game as it was - and still is - described by DBOBE doesn't gel with what ED actually is; and certainly it doesn't match up to what the Next Elite Game might reasonably have been expected to be. That is, a detailed, immersive, easy-to-learn-but-difficult-to-master space simulation with realistic flight, detailed trading/smuggling, actual detailed exploration (planetary mapping! Landing and surveying! Sampling! Reporting colonisable worlds back for rewards! Getting to name them!)...
mortenfischer was quick to weigh in and imply that the game was not 'meant to be' these things - but that's the point: the game ED was 'meant to be' is a straightforward arcade dogfighter in space. Trading is a nothingy activity, for all it makes credits - it doesn't feel like anything much. And the inclusion of rares trading, with its guarantees of profit over distance, pretty much makes ordinary trading irrelevant. Exploration is literally nothing: arrive, honk, scan, move on. Yes, Horizons has gone some way to reintroducing part of a basic feature of predecessor games - but ED is still running to catch up with its own 1990s ancestors.
It shouldn't have been multiplayer, I think, to start with. That's the core of some of the problems. It's certainly the reason we've had to throw out the physics of the Elite universe to date, and it's the reason why going to Sag A* or even crossing the galaxy is a relatively trivial thing. Relatively: I'm not saying it doesn't take time, and it certainly isn't something I'd have patience for. But it isn't something you'd have entertained on a whim in First Encounters, because it would've taken in-game years to get there. But multiplayer is certainly the reason the game's player base is fractured and restive: the Open-Vs-Everyone-Else debate rages on, as circular and stormy and apparently permanent as Jupiter's red spot - and that debate isn't going to go away, because ED is trying to please everyone, and people want different things from the same game.
Eh. TLDR, I know. Short version: by the standards of the kind of game it ended up being - an arcade space dogfighter - ED is pretty damn pretty. An excellent piece of work, by those lights. Measured against what it could have been with twenty years' gain on FFE, let alone the vision Mr B. continues to articulate, Elite Dangerous is honestly disappointing.
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