Its bloody ridiculous!
Just have one single game.
3?
No wonder nothing is getting fixed.! It's daft!
While I agree with you, I also disagree. Yes, ideally there would just be one game with a proper DLC. But Odyssey really and truly is
not a DLC, it's an entirely separate game, quite literally. With that in mind, I think that's how it should be sold. If you want Horizons (no 4.0, just 3.8), buy that for cheap. If you want Odyssey, buy that for more (Horizons not required). Two separate games, like X3 and X4 (albeit with a shared BGS).
The problem is that Frontier continues to sell Odyssey as a DLC, requiring people to buy Horizons first, and this is why they have this mess on their hands and why people are confused, demanding cross-instancing and everything else. Frontier would not even need Horizons 4.0 if Odyssey was sold as a separate, independent game, "This is where our focus is now" game and Horizons was sold as "last year's game", supported but not expanded. It happens all the time in other games - Call of Duty, Battlefield, the aforementioned X3 vs X4, etc.