Speaking as a motion graphics person who recently worked on a huge project with seemingly bottomless pockets and with endless whimsical changes of direction, after a while it's very hard to actually care about what you're doing. Yes, you're getting paid for longer than you thought, and the work itself is quite fun, but there's soon no desire to go the extra mile when you're 50% certain whatever you're working on will be thrown away a couple of months later. You can sense the frustration and lack of enthusiasm from your managers and it just becomes "What colour do they want it? Fine!" rather than the excitement of trying to impress people. Don't get me wrong, I feel lucky to do what I do (would feel luckier if it paid well!), but if you stop caring it really saps any creativity you have. You just feel like a weird rich person's plaything.
Having said that, most of the STAR CITIZEN stuff looks great, so perhaps there's more optimism within the company than there is outside of it.
There has been various reports coming out of CIGs camp. Ex-employees, leaks, sort like that. What you describe resembles an old one we had where an art designer working on character models expressed his frustration because he never got any of his work finished or had to go back to old designs all the time to adjust them to the constant changes coming from management whenever a new idea tripped CR. Add in micro-management ("this pixel needs to be blue") which might explain the incredible cost of the project for next to no net gain in progress. I cant find the article but your post reminded me of it. I ll see if I can dig it up later (or somebody else around here has a link)