I wont entertain semantics, instead lets just say I'm right when I said you probably don't know any better.
Failing that do your own investigation into successful MMO's and PC multiplayer games, see if you can spot the difference.
I apologise, that wasn't really intention – I often forget the internet can’t express tone and intent.
I've been playing MMO since the early days, including Merdian 59 and Ultima Online.
Elite Dangerous is a largely a completely new approach, a hybrid, a shared persistant galaxy with small scale P2P multiplayer. That's just what it is, for better or worse. It offers both benefits and drawbacks to traditions large scale client/server architectures. And I'm pretty sure the tech behind it is any less advanced than the traditional client/server model.
For a start it’s much less resource intensive to maintain so suits a smaller company, it also simutationly support solo and open play in the same persistant world - which is an acheiment in itself.
It also arguably suits lone wolf players and small groups of friends much more than the big raids/guild style MMO. It allows small groups to still compete in the game world, there’s no real way to shut out or dominate them in game. On the flip side you can’t have large scale events and interaction with out layers of abstraction.
Another thing to consider is there are far more casual single players and small groups who still like open world multiplayer than there are people who like big endgames large scale multiplayer. I played UO as a lone ranger in the woods, surving off the wild, selling my skinds in town. And I spent almost my entire time in WoW playing solo, and occasional ad-hoc grouping.
I really just wanted to know what do you expect out of the game? How can it be improved, what features do you want to see? I’m honestly genuinely interested.
Personally I think they've found an untapped niche, and they’ll pull this off in the end. Though it’s still got a way to go till it really jels together.
P.S. If you can play Lost Winds, that game is fantasitc and also by Frontier.