Ah, here we go...
Otherwise the faithful haven't really dived in yet.
You're thinking of things from a standard game development standpoint. If they were making any normal single player game, sure, it would take a few years, tops. But they're working on one of the deepest, most involved, most incredible sci-fi space sims we've ever seen. Likely the only one of this magnitude we'll ever see, in our lifetime. Try to remember the ing scope of what they're doing here. Also, we've seen constant steady progress. If it was a scam, they would have taken the money and run like so many crowd funding projects in the past.
Otherwise the faithful haven't really dived in yet.