Haven’t Frontier happily excluded console players from the latest features with the Legacy version?
macOS players were excluded from the entire game. Frontier don’t seem to have too much of an issue excluding former customers if it suits their purposes.
Well, firstly, I'd have to take issue with the word "happily".
I seem to recall, at the time, that FDev repeatedly expressed regret at having to abandon the console versions.
To be a little cynical, it's probably a much easier decision to exclude people who are
not going to be "customers" going forward.
Beyond that, I suspect it's simply "the path of least resistance" to stick with narrative content that can be accessed by all players instead of having to develop things specific to various DLCs.
To be clear, my concern is that FDev might come up with something
really cool, such as super-detailed planets, but then it wouldn't reach it's full potential because FDev seem to prefer to keep on providing content that only really needs the base-game.
I mean, when Horizons was "the latest thing" we didn't really get
any dynamic gameplay specific to Horizons.
We never got to follow another ship down to a surface for any reason.
We
did get some random, limited, planetary combat but that got dialled back because NPC ships had a habit of face-planting into the surface.
In all the time we've had Horizons, nobody's
ever seen an SRV that wasn't being driven by a CMDR.
Personally, I would have like to see, for example, missions to defend an outpost from attack, where hostile ships would arrive, land and drop SRVs that'd attack the base while other hostile ships engaged in "air" combat - basically, a surface CZ.
Nothing like that ever happened, though, because FDev obviously decided that planet surfaces, with static outposts on them, was enough.
Similar thing with Odyssey.
Everybody wanted "space legs" and what we
got was, basically, another SRV the size and shape of a person to drive around in.
We
didn't get to walk around inside ships or, perhaps, enter spaceports and take on missions to clear out pirates or aliens.
Sure, we
did get some new outposts, with buildings we can enter, but we didn't get any Odyssey-specific environments.
And, now Odyssey is "complete", it's unlikely we're going to get anything more advanced than we already have.
It's great that FDev
are still developing new content for ED but it doesn't seem like they ever develop DLCs to their full potential.
That's okay as long as the DLC is specific to some aspect of the game but it'd be a shame if they created something as big as super-detailed planet surfaces and then "MVPed it" because it
was "just a DLC".
Personally, I think FDev might be better off developing "niche" DLCs so that players interested in that aspect of the game could immerse themselves in it but there'd be no dilemma about how far to incorporate it into the main game.
For example, FDev could create a "Trade Tycoon" DLC, where players could purchase an "office" in a station, build ships, hire NPC crew, send ships out on trade-routes and accept contracts to supply stuff (with the option to fly a ship yourself if necessary) and players could happily dabble with that without much of an impact on the rest of the game.
