The upset has mainly happened because people are (some honestly and some wilfully) failing to see the context.
A big crowd of us have already paid for beta access. While you may or may not agree with whether we should have been charged for this, this is how we chose to support the game. I see this beta testing of big patches as FD throwing us an additional bone, which is nice.
Also, there are several advantages of this idea. First, we get the aforementioned bone. Second, we are a self-selected bunch of Elite fans. Third, we are relatively few. This makes us a supremely valuable testing tool. If the testing was open to all, FD would get thousands upon thousands of reports from testers which would really be about the core gameplay, which is settled. Testers with a clue are much more valuable than those without, and this is a genius way to access them. Establishing a pay barrier is not only fair to existing testers (who I imagine thought their special treatment ended at release, and are thus enjoying this unexpected bonus) but prevents useless shouters from clogging up the feedback mechanism.
By the way (this is in relation to another post of DCello, which I don't have a link to right now), when considering whether a feature ought to be added, you've got to consider whether it makes the game unfair. It's not simply a case of 'why can't I have it if I want it? you don't have to have it'. If it in anyway confers an advantage on one crowd over another, it needs careful consideration.
And finally, in general, FD are making the game they want to play. If they don't want a particular mechanism, there's a reason. I was (pleasantly) surprised today to read an archived thread about yaw, where they mentioned that they used to have a cursor that pointed to your current target (like in Freelancer and X), but found that it reduced the fun in combat as you ended up just focusing on the cursor, which you could follow and ignore all other scanners. So they _took it out_. Of course, we don't see this. I imagine, though, that almost all of the simple things that people propose as if it's obvious it ought to be there, have been tried already, found wanting, and left out. FD aren't idiots.
They have already shown themselves to be tougher than some other devs, and I want it to stay this way. They value feedback from the Elite old guard, and the new guard, but they still will make the game they want to play. It is crucially important to the quality of this game that the vision of the devs is not lost in a beige mishmash of all the bits people like from all the space games. It's not meant to be that, it's meant to be a hard-edged, gimlet-eyed space hawk of a genre-definer. A few years down the line, this will be one of the things everyone knows about, like Warcraft and Eve. And what will make it so is adherence to the vision. The real genius is in knowing what people want, before they do. Original Elite was this, E|D can be too.
