True - just as it had Newtonian inter-stellar flight and time-compression....
None of these have found their way into E: D.
To be fair those things were sacrificed to make the game online (which has cost the game a great deal of believe-ability with little gain for me, but that's besides the point). This is not true of 3rd person however which, lets be honest, has absolutely nothing to do with multiplayer balance and everything to do with a misguided idea of artistic purity by the devs. An idea which costs the game
- Financially due to lost sales of skins.
- Playability due to the long periods flying around in space being much less interesting than it would be if you could enjoy the spectacle of your ship hurtling through supercruise (don't even mention the horror of a debug cam) or the fact that half the time the already limited variety of visual stuff is further cut down because from inside the cockpit you can't actually see it (stations while departing, stars while flying towards your destination after warping in, etc).
- Marketing due to youtubers having to struggle with the hideous debug cam to get any cinematic shots. A proper selection of external camera modes would spawn a whole new generation of awesome videos which would in turn help to bring new players to ED.
Frankly those reasons alone should be enough to override any concerns of multiplayer balance and the possibility to restrict the external cameras to solo, private group only could always be deployed to completely avoid an issue at all. As for the artistic purity... Well it's just nonsense isn't it, where is that purity in "Community Goals", Powerplay, Engineers, or a host of other gamey systems that dominate the game?
The time has come to accept that this was a bad idea from the outset, it's costing the game money, players and marketing and needs to be binned. Put one dev on external camera coding for a couple of days and profit.