Sure but I'm not critiquing CIGs many issues. The part of CIGs work that has, well, worked, is designing and building (some) ship interiors. That work couldn't have been done by Fdev for ED without the rest of the game suffering, assuming full SC-like interiors (as opposed to cockpits only). It's far too time intensive.
My point is, no it's certainly not. It requires time from 3D artists, but that can be assigned between projects (as FDEV have multiple projects going on). What prevented FDEV of doing so, was a pure design decision: their game engine is just not built that way because they decided against it.
The comparison is fine I think. CIG made ships. Fdev made a game. A number of games. That CIG also did other weird modules and stuff, including very nice hand-crafted-not-procgen-at-all planets, and pretty clouds of which I am jealous, is true but not my point.
No it's not. Even setting aside the stupidity of doing whole planets by hand, CiG really wasted hundreds of millions of $$ on useless features, non-working game engine, constant refactors due to persisting in bad choices. In comparison, FDEV followed a quite straight forward development timeline. They indeed decided that ships would be the "main actor" of their 3D game engine, and changing that now would indeed require a huge rewrite, but deciding otherwise from the start of the project would have not changed the outcome that much, as again, they have semi-competent management and IT project structure which is NOT the case of CiG.
Lets say it otherwise: what we have now delivered from CiG is definitely not worth $400 million. By a large scale factor. Comparisons based on that budget, or the time invested by CiG in this product, should include the huge amount of bad choices, dead ends, dropped code (lots of things have disappeared during all these years..), money siphoning schemes, etc. Which makes most comparisons completely irrelevant as SC is quite unique indeed.
