The biggest problem is the same exact problem this game has had since the beginning; too many of the aspects of the game are completely disconnected from each other.
The Titan is extremely cool. I very much enjoyed poking around it and Mining it for the community goal. But absent the community goal there is very little reason to check it out.
Historically speaking, they have always obfuscated this behind the 'blaze your own trail' Credo. But I think this is finally catching up to them. This game is now composed of dozens of different micro communities, and any changes that help one of them are at best neutral and at worst actively harmful to multiple other communities.
The war narrative, for example, has been nice for the players interested in ax combat, but has rejected a significant number of bgs players. Why should they play, if months or years of work can be erased in just a few weeks by the expanding warfront?
Of course, the real issue here is that bgs was ever allowed to become a core aspect of gameplay in the first place. It was never intended to be something that players would become so invested in - that was the purpose of powerplay - but because powerplay was never fleshed out, players instead focused on bgs, since that's where their individual efforts seemed to make a difference.
Only now, we are in a situation where players can only succeed if they stand together, only we've spent the last five years establishing them as enemies. Why should historical enemies work together only to stay the same as they have always been? That's a no win scenario. Either you work together, and at best hold on to what you currently have, or you fight each other, and everyone loses.
I suggested thargoid attacks a few months back, but that was part of a much larger power play suggestion, and the primary goal of it was to allow weaker powers to Attack stronger powers; to prevent one power from becoming too rampantly powerful, and to create opportunities for smaller powers to advance.
Without that sense of progress, the war is always going to end up feeling somewhat frustrating. Hopeless battles are best in small doses. Drag them out, and it's no surprise when people lose hope.
But progress requires a larger context. Thus far, that context is largely been provided via community goals, and new modules. But the inherently stop and start nature of those things makes it a challenging way to inspire long-term player engagement.
The ideal approach would have been to set up strong and large player communities long before the thargoid war, and then use the war to shake up whatever the status quo has become and keep things interesting indefinitely. Unfortunately, given the current state of development in the game, I can't see that happening anytime soon.
I'm not normally much of a Doomer, but it seems to me the current path forward will likely consist of a few more updates for the war, some sort of climax, and then a slow winding down. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if they don't aim to have the climax come before Starfield comes out, because they doubtless can expect to lose a significant portion of their player base to that game, and given it's a Bethesda game, that loss could be permanent.
After that? Who knows. It might be time to start looking towards the next Elite game. This game has so much built up development debt, it is probably easier to start from scratch than to attempt to rework it into a game that can compete with modern releases. I think that's probably what they learned from the release of odyssey.
