The meaning of Elite, the game's title itself, means "a select part of a group that is superior to the rest in terms of ability or qualities"
But that's not what Elite ranking is in game. The Elite ranking system is a placeholder that never got updated. In previous iterations of the series, Elite was a rank you had to earn. You had to learn how to do things, perform difficult tasks, achieve certain milestones instead of just filling up a progress bar.
It was discussed in Beta, but never implemented, how Elite: Dangerous should follow that model. But the Pilot's Federation Ranks never got any attention after launch. All three major paths, Explorer/Trade/Combat, are simply counters to be incremented without any sort of tests or achievements to gauge progress. That means that you can take a base ship like the Sidewinder and advance as slowly as you like, but you will still eventually reach Elite. Even players who don't care about rank will eventually back into the title of Elite without trying. Automatically, just by playing the game long enough.
Conversely, it means that any sort of shortcut that comes up, like passenger missions for Explorer/Trade for example, means someone can get to Elite with a minimum of effort as this experiment shows.
Some kind of achievement/testing system could have prevented this, requiring CMDRs to pass in-game challenges to test their skills before ranking up, but it never happened. Instead, it's just filling up the progress bar.
And since this is the system that's been in place for three years now, it's going to be hard to change without massive overhauls to the game itself and rivers of tears from players who feel they're being short changed, so basically Frontier is left with shifting the way the ranking counters are incremented by adjusting passenger missions, for example.
All of which to say, being Elite doesn't quite mean what it used to. Instead of denoting superior ability or equality, Elite rank is simply a measure of patience - or a lack thereof.
