I think Frontier kinda messed up when they decided to focus on other silly titles instead of Elite. I'm sure this was a good financial decision for Frontier, but it was a potentially devastating delay for Elite. ED could have cornered the market and been the premier space Sim, but Frontier made several decisions to throttle marketing, development, and server resources at key moments, causing each launch day, a day that is make or break for WoM marketing, to be a laggy, crashy, slide show. Hence the game hasn't taken off like it could have with proper marketing and development. It often seems this may have been somewhat intentional especially when you consider that the P2P network design was never intended for Elite to support more than a niche mmo base. This problem is fixable though, would just take serious network investment.
Despite all of this, I'm still in the optimist camp. I've lost count of the AAA space games coming out and they are all slated for 2020, so if you want your space itch scratched before then, there aren't any serious competitors. Unless you're into tech demos. So until all the games are out, I think there's a strong chance that Frontier will pull it out of the fire in time to be competitive. Despite some arcade like features, ED is the ONLY game that comes close to representing what real space looks like. To me that is priceless and irreplaceable. You have to use a planetarium app to get anything more accurate, and even those don't come close for certain features. And despite what many people say, the galaxy is still vibrant with an overlapping patch work of highly active groups that keep the Galaxy very interesting, at least in Open.