Why wouldn't you want to use it all the time? I turned my setting from LowVR to MediumVR and the ASW only kicks in a little sooner at the surface. When I'm at or near the stations it's on all the time even in low.
It was designed to mask the occassional dropped frame under load, particularly on minimum spec hardware. Not really as a crutch to max out settings far above what high end hardware can provide, although people do and are happy doing so. ASW is fantastic but does introduce undesirable graphical glitches as well as other tells.
Elite really needs some VR focused optimizations, particularly around stations where quite frankly the performance on even high end equipment is shockingly poor. Support (and likely the developers by extension) choose to ignore all bug reports regarding VR performance in such areas of the game and actively try to shut down / indefinitely stall bug reports about this issue. Such bug reports have an unrealistically high bar set, such as no action being taken until absolutely everyone who comments in such bug report threads provide pointless DXDiag logs and then move those threads to the graveyard of the support forum to rot in a place where people can't see them and they no longer get replies from the team. One of the devs spending just 10 minutes playing the game in VR would demonstrate such performance problems and the negative impact they have on VR gameplay and the user who potentially could be made to feel very sick due to those performance problems.
The fact that such performance issues go unnoticed by the development team in every major update goes to show that they are not testing those releases with VR headsets at all. The last major VR issue took more than a year to even get acknowledged and then even longer to get resolved, other issues with landable planets and meshes being culled on the edges of your FOV to this very day remain in game despite being reported over and over again including in the original horizons beta.
Most people running super sampling at high levels in this title and as such, having a high dependencey on ASW, are doing so in order to make text more legible and / or in an attempt to mask the shimmer caused by the god awful jaggies caused partly by the Cobra engines poor antialiasing. If those issues were addressed I doubt many people with higher end equipment would feel the need to super sample at all let alone force the game to run at 45FPS upscaled to 90FPS via ASW in an attempt to cover up such issues.
I'm not even going to start on the shoddy netcode and the impact it appears to have on performance. We'll just leave it at 'not cut out for the job'.
