Of course people will lose patience if this drags for too long, as said elsewhere my personal fence to jump if i don't see noticeable improvements (i meant optimizations, they are already making improvements) is set to update 8 (so, no pressure for that...), but the hard truth is still that even they don't (and can't) know the answer.
Yes I remember we had this convo before (after I quoted you, natch). While it is true that improvements have been made, they're quite incremental and too meandering for my taste (up to patch 4 it got a little better, then patch 5 improved some areas while others become 100% unplayable so a net step backwards, patch 6/6.01 semi improved things again but I'm still having severe drops in random places, sometimes even in the docking bay of all places, which suggests culling/garbage collecting issues remain a factor).
Will be interesting to see how the return of CAS changes things (part of 7, right?), I presume not by much and it's more a case of what look one prefers (especially for those who play on 1080p displays - I much preferred CAS fwiw, even if it didn't really bring performance gains but the image looked better to me).
I also think that the real issue isn't graphics as such, but NPCs - whenever they're around my performance tanks; while empty settlements without ships yield an almost stable 60fps locked. Which is more what I expect given the (lack of) visual fidelity on display.
FSR to me isn't an improvement either per se (even though I've seen some posters using it as an argument that it helped - yes, but at what cost) but a temporary stopgap until "proper" optimization occurs; though I get the feeling that it might actually be part of the overall plan to make Odyssey acceptable to people who don't care/know what it does and/or don't see the visual downgrade it brings.
But who knows - it might actually work out for Frontier, especially when I see how people are a-okay with the degraded visuals when comparing them with Horizons (such as the burning stations comparison thread). When your customers have limited expectations in terms of performance/visuals, you might get away with putting less effort into it. Hope I'm wrong and Frontier retains a minimum level of artistic pride and sorts those out regardless.
As I said before, the way in how patch 7 is rolled out and the quality of it (how much does it fix vs. how much does it wreck that wasn't broken?) will be a key acid test for me, so I might not end up waiting for patch 8, which could still be
several months away for all we know.