I've been on the forums and in the game since the beginning. The hopes that I'd held onto that this game would become what the original Elite could have been if they had todays tech then is starting to fail. The glossing over of major gameplay bugs is wearing thin. The 'New" bug reporting tool seems to be a glorified lottery and an exercise in how they can bury reports.
I'm getting too old to hang on waiting for the game to become what it could be, Braben is no spring chicken either, he'd better stop polishing his trinket off the queen and get into the office and get the playbook re-written because it seems his 'baby' is going off the rails.
I wouldn't phrase it like that, but I have to agree on some points. While I don't really mind the bugs, the space sim feeling is getting more and more lost for me. I have played original Elite, Frontier and First Encounters a lot and actually went back to the fan-polished 3d version of First Encounters after any space game I tried so far, be that the X games, Freelancer or whatever. Slowly but surely I start to miss F2FE again since ED more and more moves away from the scientifically driven space sim it once was and gets more and more "gamey" and less authentic due to certain design decistions like adding colour grading for star systems instead of more realistic lighting (which would be less colourful of course), adding button prompts and help functions to ship controls to aid new players but hitting the simulation feeling with that and so on.
It's design choices that lead away from what I always loved about Elite, in the old games and also in ED. I mean, yeah, maybe more average gamers will join the train and maybe less new players quit after being overwhelmed by having to use more than three buttons to fly a space ship, but it's less and less the game I and many others who have been with it for a long time (since the freaking 80s actually!) love so much.
Sorry for the off topicness, that just happened.
EDIT: to leave with a suggestion and not with negativity: there is an "easy" fix to this so far, at least to some of the issues, and that's options. Make colour grading optional, tutorial functions like button prompts and help buttons in the interface and so on. Yeah, more work, but I am pretty sure people would love that. Give us a choice.