It's kinda like trying to separate the eggs from the cake, though. Without the Kickstarter it's unlikely ED would exist at all, and even if it had come to market independently it may not have found or grown its audience if legacy players had tried it, declared "This isn't Elite" due to instantaneous travel, and abandoned it. I guess with hindsight the best outcome might have been a Kickstarter but without the DDF pledge level, so feedback could have been taken without any sense (no matter how diluted it became) of obligation to listen.
Would it have crossed the line without the DDF level? My instinct (and that's all it is, based on the numbers at the time) is that it would have, but then it's impossible to quantify what promotional effect it had in terms of generating new pledges at levels both at and not at DDF level. I'm certainly aware of a number of players who widely discussed how they'd increased their pledges to DDF when the infamous "god-like powers" were mentioned (and I can only imagine how peed off many of those particular players will have been, given how that turned out).
Untrue.
Err... eee... aaa... a distorted interpretation at best, I feel. The original proposal was 100% for jumps between systems and micro-jumps between bodies. As far as I remember it was always the intent for interstellar jumps to arrive at the largest mass, and for micro-jumps to take place from there. There is a chance that arrivals at the fringes of the system were also discussed, a la original Elite and Frontier, but the threads aren't available in the archive for me to check. Either way you were looking at jumping to a fixed point, then micro-jumping to a destination. No jumping straight from Tattooine to Aldreaan without some sort of navigation in between.
Interdiction of some sort was always part of the design, but for micro-jumps would have taken the form of witchspace "nets" deployed along common vectors between bodies, or near to orbital arrival points. Combat was always intended to take place in "real" space.
The backlash against this idea from the DDF was strong and, while not unanimous, unusually unified. As to be expected from a group composed largely of former Elite and (especially) Frontier players, the fear was that micro-jumping with occasional interdictions would reduce the scale of the inhabited galaxy to the degree where there would be little point in rendering it 1:1 in the first place. And for deep space exploration with no ability to accelerate time like in FE2 and FFE, cruising through space at FTL speeds was seen by many as the only way to capture some of the freedom available in the earlier games.
The frameshift drive was FD's answer to this. While not a true analogue to the two 90s games (supercruise is not Newtonian) it struck a middle ground with which most of the DDF was happy. Frameshift interdiction was also a new mechanic, introduced alongside the FSD. So while it was wholly FD's idea and implementation, it would definitely not have been implemented in this way without the then community's response to the earlier proposal.
FWIW I've always liked the notion of using nav beacons to speed up travel within the bubble. An original proposal back in the day (possibly CMDR Cosmic Spacehead's; his was certainly the last post I read to mention it) was to allow ships' hyperdrives to use nav beacon data to increase effective jump ranges. But the idea of using planetary beacons to facilitate in-system jumps works for me too. In non-anarchy systems there may be a need for some equivalent of the interdiction mechanic to prevent ships from only travelling between "safe" locations (maybe some sort of wake destabiliser that forces a ship to abort a jump midway?) but since the end result is a combat instance in "normal" space I don't see any reason why this would fundamentally break the game.
As community requests go this one is quite unusual in that the fundamental question here -- can we have fast(er) travel within the bubble and/or well-travelled routes while keeping the sense of scale for fringe exploration? -- can be answered with a qualified "yes" in a way that doesn't actually break the game for anyone who likes the status quo. Of all the "FD give us xxx" threads, this is the subject most likely to be doable IMO.
Whether FD are savvy enough to spot this and put it on the wishlist is entirely up to them, of course, but given how many recent design decisions seem to have be aimed at opening up or simplifying access to the game for jaded and/or latecomer players, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if something along these lines has at least been discussed.
And it also has nothing to do with crowd funding.
