IMHO ELITE vs. Lore has a few deep issues, which I think are highly problematic :
- History rewrite / "parallel Universe"
A solid part of the original lore (defined as : existed in previous titles) has been thrown overboard to create a new Situation of a supposedly underdeveloped mankind encountering some superior new Threat called "Thargoids". According to MB, some "scuffle" occurred in the past against them, but that meant "Mankind barely survived and that was only against a scouting party of the Thargoids. Now they wonder what happened to their scouting party and return".
There's a few issues with that alone, since it's simply wrong. The Thargoids (as a species) barely survived, mankind was mopping the floor with them using nothing but mere Cobras using Military Lasers and later nearly wiped them out entirely with the Mycoid Virus. Saved only by a brave CMDR delivering them the only cure.
However, none of all that supposedly happened, which throws us into some weird parallel Universe and invalidates the existing history almost in its entirety. On top, almost noone can safely say anymore (outside of a few snippets from FDev) which part of the lore is still "active" and which went "cold".
Even some in-game Tourist beacons containing lore snippets seem sometimes in conflict with the "new lore", as they contain "old lore" that supposedly ceased to exist, which ends up being rather confusing and making it all very obfuscated.
- Lore vs. in-game assets
Basically ranges from missing Systems to wrong System types or locations (partly credited to old 2D Galaxy of oldest title) over wrong or missing Body types of lore locations all the way to simply missing things that just don't exist.
That leaves everything even more fragmented and chaotic, since we have "a little bit of everything" but also miss alot of things that should be there.
- Lore progression / Narration
Despite the best hype efforts (i.e. "Winter is coming"), the Narration turned out often very poor, absolutely glacier-paced, even the biggest events of the Galaxy didn't even affect Players for the most part and the reaction even of NPCs towards the supposed events on-location too often was simply non-existent. That meant it typically wasn't credible nor engaging.
Many of the minor Storylines were so weird/obtuse, they could easily be entirely missed. At some point, there were supposedly upto five separate Storylines going on at the same time - all while most of them could hardly be noted even if one actively looked for or tried to make sense of them.
So despite offering itself for countless assets in-game, those typically don't exist.
Hence there's no places to go and investigate and maybe (maybe....) get a little hint to additional background Information or other places to seek. Nothing.
And thus, there's basically nothing one could do to actively investigate stuff and there's nothing to discover at the end of such a road.
As a consequence, it's all more like "feel free to ignore, doesn't matter anyway".
And when that's the verdict on what should be the biggest details/easter eggs/mysteries of the entire Galaxy, you just know something is very very wrong.
I take it the whole complex would belong to "fleshing things out" - and rightfully deserve it.
Unfortunately, that doesn't belong to the "can be monetized" bucket and hence got little more than the usual MVP treatment. It costs money but short-term doesn't bring any in, hence no work is being invested in the face of other projects demanding alot of resources from the team.