I think the majority of normal players don't want it, just a fanatical and loud minority!
If that was the case then why have player activity numbers risen significantly and average Steam review scores risen very slightly since the introduction of the quickstart ships? The majority of players clearly don't care in the slightest either way - they're not going to buy this stuff themselves, but they don't care if other people do: what Frontier produces in terms of actual features has had a massively more significant impact on player numbers, player activity levels, and franchise revenue.
Anyone who objected to P2W in all forms would never have bought ED in the first place because of the Kickstarter perks (which were advertised on day 1 of the Kickstarter itself). Almost everyone else ... the game has not yet slipped far enough down the slippery slope for it to be a problem for them. What it does in a decade is a problem for a decade's time, sure - but most people don't play games with the "I hope this is still good in a decade" hope because there'll be other games released by then anyway.
At the moment the P2W in Elite Dangerous solely consists of some largely irrelevant advantages (rebuy discounts when "losing your ship at all" is practically a game bug/design flaw) and some quickstart things which don't get anywhere near the capabilities of a fully-optimised ship. Unlike EVE, the game has virtually no competitive elements anyway and doesn't sell itself on either its direct PvP or its indirect forms. So
at the moment the majority of players really don't care either way (though nor are they rushing out to buy these quickstart options).
If Frontier brings out something considerably more useful as a cash-only purchase in five years time? Sure, at that point that might be a problem. They're not obliged to do that in a finite timescale: the trend from
2012: you can purchase a 25% or 50% rebuy discount on all your ships and modules
2024: you can purchase a 100% rebuy discount on a very small number of ships and modules
is
extremely slow.
People are generally going to spend more time worrying and posting on what Frontier is going to do in the last/next month
- fail to document colonisation sufficiently for people to understand what they're supposed to be doing
- make knee-jerk changes to player feedback on colonisation which end up going too far the other way and actually make things worse
- not make changes to player feedback and just move on and leave it as it is
than about what they might hypothetically do in 5-10-20 years time when the game might have closed for unrelated reasons, people will most likely have personally moved on to something else anyway even if it doesn't, etc.
players who don't want pay to win in Elite need to speak up and raise their concerns
When the first quickstart ships were introduced there were a large number of threads like this one, a large number of negative Steam reviews ... and then within a month it was all back to normal, what's the fuss about, everyone talking about the new Powerplay 2 announcement details instead.
They've had the feedback, they've more importantly seen how many people
actually voted with their feet and/or wallets almost a year ago, and they've presumably concluded from that there is no harm (and a small amount of extra income) at the current level.
If they change the level later to introduce larger P2W that crosses more people's red lines (and aren't smart enough to package it up as a DLC rather than an ARX purchase to fool most of those players into thinking it's actually absolutely fine and praiseworthy) ... then that might cause a large enough actual change in player behaviour (as opposed to a bit of ignorable short-term forum noise) to change their minds on it.
