There are many features that rely on each other, even some that aren't obvious and seem disconnected for an outsider. You can't improve certain areas before you didn't finish work on other frameworks, one simple reason is that you don't want to recode everything several times because you changed something that interferes with an already finished feature. The point is that every current feature in ED is a placeholder, nothing is finished. If they would not release their features half baked we wouldn't have a game, there would be no space ships and no galaxy. Everything we would have is a theoretical design of a flight model, because that's pretty much the only thing that doesn't need further work. I prefer to play a half baked game instead of another Duke Nukem Forever.
One example are NPC faces and the bulletin board:
We asked for them since day one and said they could just put some artworks there. But creating them does take time and this time is wasted once they get replaced with the real NPC faces they wanted to put there in the first place. The whole bulletin board is a place holder, the next bulletin board in 2.1 will be a place holder as well because they will replace it once walking around in stations gets implemented. So we can either play with a half baked feature or have no missions at all, I prefer the former.
This approach also helps them to get valuable feedback from the community. Some people think they don't listen to us but that's just not true, the list of features that got changed based on feedback is very long.
So all in all E.D is an ever evolving placeholder.