1. What is happening with the engineering changes that were hinted at following this
post? Was that actual research on behalf of FDev to implement change, or will it result in nothing?
Actual research, yes - but that doesn't mean it has to result in anything.
"There's some things that could be tweaked, but there doesn't seem to be anything which would massively improve satisfaction compared with now, so it's a low priority"
and
"No-one particularly likes it, but there's also no consensus on what the problems are and which bits do work well"
are both outcomes which could result in them not changing much.
2. What is happening with the promised Key Feature Overhaul set for early 2023, mentioned in this
post? It is February 2023, a.k.a early 2023, and we haven’t heard a word on the topic since.
It doesn't use the exact same words (which I think are being rather over-analysed) but the U14 announcement said
"What we can say for now about Updates 15 and 16 is that they will both contain new content and gameplay mechanics linked to the unfolding events in the galaxy. More on this will be revealed next year."
which is almost certainly talking about the same thing. If it is, and therefore the overhaul is plot-related, I would expect something similar to U14 where the way you find out what it is is by downloading the update and seeing what happens, rather than months of the CMs talking about how excited they are first.
Needless to say, these two posts inspired many players to keep playing, hoping for a positive change.
I have to ask "why?" here - if you need some future hype that in future the game might be better to keep playing it now, then that implies you aren't finding it fun as-is. So why keep playing until the vague thing happens, rather than stopping playing and coming back to check once it has? There's no subscription to maintain, no reason to just not play for six months and do something else, no weird skill decay stuff if you don't login once a week (well, except your own ability to remember what you'd bound "landing gear" to).
(Especially for a hypothetical future Engineering reform; if it somehow makes engineering "non-grindy" for whatever your personal benchmark is for that, you're absolutely better off
not doing any engineering until then if you can, because it'll be easier later)
