That's kinda funny. Supercruise is the line that places elite as a flight simulator or rebel galaxy outlaw. Probably turned out worse for frontier. While they wouldn't have any long term sim players, they would have had a much more casual kbm crowd and elite probably would have been closer to mainstream. Who knows they could have justified spending much more money on it if it was a more casual game. The other side is they also couldn't have gotten away with half baking literally everything they do for a more casual crowd.. Fun to imagine from your story anyway.
.. I bet they regret that one decision most of all
They were trying to solve the technical challenge of turning an open world space game into one that would work over P2P networking and multiplayer. That's where the POI system came from, and why were told we couldn't have free movement. The other argument they used was that space was a) big and b) mostly empty, so there was no "need" to have us able to fly to any point in space.
As I said, to their credit, they somehow managed to solve all of these technical issues & it was the defining moment of the DDF and probably the game itself. The E: D flight model is still held up as being the best in the genre - and even though the likes of X4 and NMS are fundamentally better games in every other way, the flight model is the thing that keeps being brought up as a reason to either stick with Elite or why those other games aren't as good.
They've gone full casual since though. Odyssey was never aimed at Elite players, and even discounting the bugs & lack of optimisation / finishing development, there are highly questionable design decisions made throughout that needed a group of players who actually
play the game and care about it to help Frontier. I don't believe that whoever thought the UI was a good design has ever actually played the game. Same with the plant scanning, and a bunch of other things.
Missed opportunity, but it's too late, and it's too bad.
