There is no doubt and I never claimed there was, that Elite is Unique. What I do cry about is my frustration that there are apparently 100+ devs working on this, and have been for some 5 years, and this is where we are.. The Elite world is amazing;y big, but there's a lot to do in it is there? if you count doing the same repetitive things over and over again, then I fear your gaming expectations are very low.

You might be interested in the New Era expansion that's been in production for over a year, and is scheduled for release 2H2020.We're 5 years down the road and we can't even walk around our ships. We can't walk on planets. The planets we can land on are generic. And the rest is fluff that entails jumping from one instanced system tot he next instanced system.
But.. There are some players that like that, and I do respect it.
4000 hours of playtime is quite something - that's playing Elite Dangerous every day since release for an average of 2.5hrAs for paying for my game.. I bought 5 copies including Horizons on all of them, plush hundreds in ships kits and paint jobs.. Then there's the 4000 odd hours I've invested..
The only games that I've ever clocked up more than 10 hours on are those games that I love playing. You must really love playing Elite Dangerous