WorldsGreatestForumDad
Banned
Oh, I expect we'll hear about it sooner and possibly see sneak peeks of the work in progress (of features / elements that have been judged to be absolutely definitely included in the release) - just that I'm not expecting it to release for about nine months (or possibly more).
There was a comment in a stream quite some time ago that one Dev had been working on an underlying aspect of the game for quite some time as part of a future development. Two candidates for possible "beyond Beyond" content, that are already on the list of things that Frontier have said they'd like to do are atmospheric planets and "space legs". Given the more realistic nature of the JWE environment compared to Planet Coaster, it's possible that there's some cross-over to E: D from changes to COBRA required to implement these features in both games.
Yes it seems like game engine changes is something thats in the works.