After playing this game for some months and a couple hundred hours I've come to one inescapable conclusion: Elite sucks.
This is not a "quirky" game. This is not a game which is incomplete, nor one which is obtuse, nor one which is "still under development," nor any of the myriad other excuses people keep finding to postpone the inevitable discovery that this game is simply lousy. This is just a bad game.
It is really hard for me to admit that I not only spent $75US (more than I've ever paid for a game before) and bought a $125US game controller specifically to play this thing, but that I've wasted the equivalent of multiple work weeks in a vain attempt to make a silk purse from this sow's ear. I kept expecting the game to improve somehow with the constant revisions that were being pushed unbidden out to the users. Some things did improve, of course, but others remain hideously broken. And no fixes can make up for the unbelievably stupid game design decisions that remain as core to this sow's ear.
There is no excuse for things like the catastrophically bad design of the stations. The tiny entry/exit port, no active traffic control, no real lighting on the totally useless framework of pipes outside the port (apparently there just to be a PITA), no posted speed limit, landing pad lights that flicker on and off (still broken after how many revisions?), and junk sticking up right in front of the pad you want to land on. And who was the moron who designed EVERY SINGLE PAD on EVERY SINGLE PLATFORM to have some crap like a tower or some other junk right in the approach path to the pad, even if the other side of the pad is open to vast, interstellar space?
And how about the constant, non-stop, completely useless and annoying cut scenes for entry into supercruise/hyperspace, descending/ascending bay elevators, weapon provisioning, blah blah blah? I never again want to hear 4..3..2..1 yo' flippin' momma. Stuff like this is simply a waste of time, which is a Very Bad Thing in what is supposed to be an interactive game. Most games which have these kinds of cutscenes either have a way to bypass the action through a key or have a setting to eliminate them altogether. Either way the user can get rid of the waste of time involved in pressing a button and then having nothing to do for the next 25 seconds or so until control comes back. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Is it really so hard for a game company to look around at other flight games and steal their best ideas for a HUD? Because Frontier have not done so. In fact, it looks like they went around to other game companies and dug into their trash cans for the ideas that were discarded as being crappy. Elite's HUD has very little data displayed, and much too much kaka. The whole left side of the HUD is a bunch of useless data that could be far better conveyed as small graphics, perhaps bargraphs. The sensor display is worse than useless, since it changes scale on its own and doesn't tell you anything about what that scale is. The complete lack of user color control on the HUD is inexcusable, particularly when you consider that the (fixed) HUD primary color is the same as that of the vast bulk of the stars that users face when they exit hyper. Who was the dumb fart that came up with that idea?!?
But one of the most infuriating aspects of this game is the cheating. For example, anyone who has done any amount of bounty hunting at nav beacons knows how cops will dart between you and an NPC target that you have under fire. Now, if you happen to get between a cop and the Bad Guy and get clipped by some friendly fire that's your lookout. But if the dumb-ass cop dives between you and the target and happens to catch a stray round then suddenly your status is WANTED and all the cops ignore every other NPC to come after you. And please don't tell me that this is accidental, because I have seen hundreds of examples of the cops diving into a live stream of fire. THIS IS INTENTIONAL BEHAVIOR. What a piece of crap for any game to not play by its own rules. This game is rife with examples.
Another cheating piece of kaka example is buying/selling ships. Did you realize that the game steals 10% of the value of the ship you are selling whenever you go to trade at the shipyard? There is no notification of this; it just takes your money without warning and without recourse. Great. If you happen to have a calculator on you and you figure out the value of your ship you can see what's going on, but if you figure that the shipyard is going to act like the outfitting mechanism and give you back what you paid for an item then you are getting screwed. Thanks, Frontier!
I could go on and on about the poor choices in game design displayed by this game. The implementation is bad enough, with bugs that have been there since Beta days that Frontier haven't fixed yet, and the stu-stu-stu-stuttering of the SC/hyperspace transitions and approach to planets, and the daily server shutdown to perform "maintenance," and on and on and on. But it all leads to one conclusion, and that is this:
Elite Dangerous is a bad game.
This is not a "quirky" game. This is not a game which is incomplete, nor one which is obtuse, nor one which is "still under development," nor any of the myriad other excuses people keep finding to postpone the inevitable discovery that this game is simply lousy. This is just a bad game.
It is really hard for me to admit that I not only spent $75US (more than I've ever paid for a game before) and bought a $125US game controller specifically to play this thing, but that I've wasted the equivalent of multiple work weeks in a vain attempt to make a silk purse from this sow's ear. I kept expecting the game to improve somehow with the constant revisions that were being pushed unbidden out to the users. Some things did improve, of course, but others remain hideously broken. And no fixes can make up for the unbelievably stupid game design decisions that remain as core to this sow's ear.
There is no excuse for things like the catastrophically bad design of the stations. The tiny entry/exit port, no active traffic control, no real lighting on the totally useless framework of pipes outside the port (apparently there just to be a PITA), no posted speed limit, landing pad lights that flicker on and off (still broken after how many revisions?), and junk sticking up right in front of the pad you want to land on. And who was the moron who designed EVERY SINGLE PAD on EVERY SINGLE PLATFORM to have some crap like a tower or some other junk right in the approach path to the pad, even if the other side of the pad is open to vast, interstellar space?
And how about the constant, non-stop, completely useless and annoying cut scenes for entry into supercruise/hyperspace, descending/ascending bay elevators, weapon provisioning, blah blah blah? I never again want to hear 4..3..2..1 yo' flippin' momma. Stuff like this is simply a waste of time, which is a Very Bad Thing in what is supposed to be an interactive game. Most games which have these kinds of cutscenes either have a way to bypass the action through a key or have a setting to eliminate them altogether. Either way the user can get rid of the waste of time involved in pressing a button and then having nothing to do for the next 25 seconds or so until control comes back. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Is it really so hard for a game company to look around at other flight games and steal their best ideas for a HUD? Because Frontier have not done so. In fact, it looks like they went around to other game companies and dug into their trash cans for the ideas that were discarded as being crappy. Elite's HUD has very little data displayed, and much too much kaka. The whole left side of the HUD is a bunch of useless data that could be far better conveyed as small graphics, perhaps bargraphs. The sensor display is worse than useless, since it changes scale on its own and doesn't tell you anything about what that scale is. The complete lack of user color control on the HUD is inexcusable, particularly when you consider that the (fixed) HUD primary color is the same as that of the vast bulk of the stars that users face when they exit hyper. Who was the dumb fart that came up with that idea?!?
But one of the most infuriating aspects of this game is the cheating. For example, anyone who has done any amount of bounty hunting at nav beacons knows how cops will dart between you and an NPC target that you have under fire. Now, if you happen to get between a cop and the Bad Guy and get clipped by some friendly fire that's your lookout. But if the dumb-ass cop dives between you and the target and happens to catch a stray round then suddenly your status is WANTED and all the cops ignore every other NPC to come after you. And please don't tell me that this is accidental, because I have seen hundreds of examples of the cops diving into a live stream of fire. THIS IS INTENTIONAL BEHAVIOR. What a piece of crap for any game to not play by its own rules. This game is rife with examples.
Another cheating piece of kaka example is buying/selling ships. Did you realize that the game steals 10% of the value of the ship you are selling whenever you go to trade at the shipyard? There is no notification of this; it just takes your money without warning and without recourse. Great. If you happen to have a calculator on you and you figure out the value of your ship you can see what's going on, but if you figure that the shipyard is going to act like the outfitting mechanism and give you back what you paid for an item then you are getting screwed. Thanks, Frontier!
I could go on and on about the poor choices in game design displayed by this game. The implementation is bad enough, with bugs that have been there since Beta days that Frontier haven't fixed yet, and the stu-stu-stu-stuttering of the SC/hyperspace transitions and approach to planets, and the daily server shutdown to perform "maintenance," and on and on and on. But it all leads to one conclusion, and that is this:
Elite Dangerous is a bad game.
...makes you zone out midway 
