WELL, this thread took some interesting turns! It's been a very interesting read catching up over 30 pages since last night! [big grin]
With regards to the anemic multicrew feature of 2.3, my gut tells me that Windscreen may actually have a point. He even posted some factual evidence to support it, but really, all you need do is look at the slower pace of updates coupled with the lacking features as of late compared to what they were originally supposed to be, and add in QA which takes far longer than it should to fix important bugs, and you end up with Elite Dangerous experiencing development slowdown and issues. The symptoms are synonymous with a term from the video game industry known as "twilighting", when games enter into a more maintenance phase of development rather than full on development.
However, I don't think that is the case with Elite, not entirely anyway. Rather I believe that the burden of working on three platforms simultaneously (PC, Xbox, and PS4) has encumbered both the dev team and QA department to the point of simply not being able to keep up with their schedules. Because of this, features slip, mechanics go on the backburner, bugs go unfixed because QA is now doing three times the work they used to. It's not an uncommon phenomenon in the industry, unfortunately.
Now, this is all speculation of course, none of us can truly know what the deal is, BUT the evidence is in the updates themselves. Curtailed features, neglected mechanics, slipping schedules, and unfixed bugs. No matter what you think, those are the reality.
Regarding multicrew, we can only hope that someday in the future the feature gets improved upon to be made useful for more than just combat players. For now though, for whatever reason, it is what it is. [sad]