Its a shame that something concrete hasn't been forth comming from frontier. I'm sure I saw some stats from the Steam hardware survey that showed almost double VIVE users to Rift users.
I have to say Elite isn't the only game I've been disappointed with. Project Cars also runs very poorly in VR. Assetto Corsa on the other hand runs amazingly well so it is obviously possible to make VR runs just as well as non-VR games.
ProjectCar is also a lot more GPU-Resource hungry than Assetto Corsa with more and complexer shapes and shaders. Reduce the gfx details and you will be able to run it as well as Assetto Corsa (it will STILL be subpar in terms of physics, but that is another completey independant issue).
The same applies with Elite. Reduce the graphical details and you will easily get acceptable framerates on a GTX970, even with (chaperone!) SS. Please bear in mind that just because your rig is easily capable of running Elite maxxed out in 2D doesn't mean it can do the same in VR
AT ALL.
Personally I have a non-overclocked i5-3470, a Zotac GTX1070 AMP! and 16GB of RAM and I can run the game without any (visible) reprojection with 1.75/0.65 SS, medium shadows, no occlusion, medium blur, no AA (personal choice really... I prefer everything sharp), no Depth of Field, the rest on high or ultra. I might get reprojection while driving fast across a "complex" moon in the SRV, but honestly I couldn't really tell and I can't be to start the profiler just to know.
Visually, the game looks fine. Yes .. I do get the shimering near horizontal lines which I could alleviate by reducing some more options, and incresing the SS+some anti aliasing.
It is all a question of compromises.
The only issue I have in VR is the scale being off, and I really hope that FD comes up with an in-game IPD slider.