The engineers are way better now than they were before. We get to craft much better and consistent modules with far less grind for those top tier mods.
As I said before, Q4 will have a huge impact on my ED playtime wether it be positive or negative.
I agree with this. We can't judge what the player base is doing right now. There's no doubt that elite is several years old and some players will have semi retired, some still active whilst others are waiting for their favourite roadmap features to be implemented. Once those have materialised I think we'll see the true picture.
Elite seems to be almost unique in my experience. I have never owned a game and gotten so much out of it for a single purchase and more content is yet to come this year- and there's still developer interest in yet more future work. Honestly, how many other games out there have so much continuous development?
I think Elite is a victim of its own success. People are so involved and invested with it, and yet with a little more fine tuning dev wise, we could get an even better game. So people harp on in these forums wanting their own agenda added, or pushing fdev to complete things they said they could do...but we do have to realise that we are lucky to have the game that we have and the development that's being committed to right now. Like I said, most other companies would probably have stopped.