By the time that they figure out that, competitors by themselves (or even by stealing the info of how RSI managed to solve the technical hurdles - if they ever solve them) will deliver more and better, possibly in higher fidelity, or maybe just near enough, but practical and with better gameplay. Not the same game, but with a feature set/feeling enough that will make Star Citizen to get stale. To seem old. To seem a clone of others released earlier, with too much controversy and backe effort spent in something... absolutely... meh.
So... the SC effort brings a possible legacy to the game industry, because some research may be bring some new magic code to be reproduced in other games /devs, but is pointless to Star Citizen and RSI itself and its backers, due this simple reality of how the market and this industry works.
Besides, people paid to get a game delivered that was advertised as designed, with an acceptable timeline, just needing money to be implemented/released. People were lead to believe that giving them more money would just make they put other things in the dev pipeline, instead putting "research" to figure out if maybe would be possible to realize the dream in the pipeline.
That's the big problem with this project, if you believe in the good faith of the devs willing to deliver something (which it's not my case by the way, I believe that they know that the project is a certain flop and just decided to make as more money as possible on it). But if you believe in their good faith, anyway, they made this mistake, and guess what, this mistake is called scamming consumers, false advertising, deceptive marketing and is against the law. Because they had and have the legal obligation of not been deceptive and not mislead consumers. And that's what they did for years.
