I will say though that while I don't give a toss he's leaving again I feel I'm entitled to be amused by it.
I am not sure if feeling amused by it makes much sense if you in general are supportive of the game. It has become clear that there is a portion of the users playing ED who do relate to Drew's contributions, and as a result feel that it is a loss to them, in their experience of playing the game, when he decides to turn his back on the game. To me this is in the same mold as Dr. Kay leaving - I could say it doesn't matter, someone will take over her duties. But you just feel that it might not be the case, or at least not with equivalent output. And it is a token of dissatisfaction with ED current development, not completely unfamiliar, is it. Sure, it doesn't affect my game play tonight, so to speak, but it casts a further shadow over my own motivation to carry own.
'Announcing' he is leaving' will effect no-one. Claiming that this is somehow significant is amusing.
Well, no-one is incorrect. It will at least affect me. Perhaps not only me. As to the significance - see my comment above.
One thing he said rang loudly with me, that Odyssey, as an fps, is not in the spirit of Elite Dangerous.
Well, this is the part where I am not sure I would go as far as he & some other do. I do think that space legs have something to add to the Elite universe - it is just that other parts nearer to the core experience are still missing, need to be added or fleshed out, before space legs should have been tackled. But in the grander scheme of things it is great to be able to leave your ship, move around and experience the world/universe more like you and I would actually, if we were truly captain of a space ship. But it has come premature, into a largely dead world, and it would have made much more sense to first tackle the atmospheric & inhabited planets (and by that I don't mean the same dead rocks with a shade of blue or red above the horizon). There are tons of tricks they could have used to make sense in the game (too hard to create entire inhabited planets ? Invent restricted fly-in zones with limited freedom, and force shields or else making it impossible to roam the entire planet - but do something to make it convincing.
Imho space legs was the wrong choice in terms of priority, not in terms of game play element.
This is why I would have expected Drew to say that he will withdraw for the time being, and once in a while check if it makes sense for him to come back. He chose to be more dramatic. I guess that is due to him being a writer ? But as pointed out by others, his disappointment about the state of the game must be so much bigger than e.g. mine, given the participation he had in it for the past 9 years - and still he had no power to right the ship.