And since Engineering V6 would also be produced and incorporated into the game by Frontier Developments, and not by some mythical competent developer of Elite-like space games, the same is likely to happen again.
Only if they commit to repeating the same process and mistakes that resulted in these less-than-optimal results over and over. Fdev's shown signs of making shifts and changes in their process before. They are competent. The issue is in direction.
Could it be better? Yes. So could the entire rest of the game and I'd rather that they put their effort - however mismanaged and badly designed compared to MythiSoft - into something that has been ignored since initial release.
Now there's a Silicon Valley startup name....
You're not wrong to also place importance on the things they have neglected since release, which is considerable. I'm not making light of the plate-juggling act it's going to take to manage the complexities of the problems Fdev faces in improving this game.
But I do continue to view the Engineering issue as one of top importance.
On the contrary I think this is basically the key to the whole dispute. The underlying question is "should players have any meaningful constraints on their ability to upgrade their ship to its maximum?".
If the answer is "no" then the correct approach is just to abolish engineering, and sell G5 modules (no point in offering lower, the downsides are basically irrelevant) as AA-rated in the Outfitting, with some local "engineering" service to pick experimentals at a nominal cost.
If the answer is "yes" then absolutely the engineering system should be encouraging players to think about questions like "which modules are the priority to push to G5" and "how little can I engineer this new ship and still have it fit for purpose" and "having obtained these new materials, what's the priority to spend them" ... which means players shouldn't have the materials they need to just routinely G5 everything - at least not until they've been playing for quite some time.[
Why only consider the two extremes? Why not permit the upgrading our ships to the maximum without obviously artificial gimmicks hampering our efforts? Why commit to the "5-grade" system? Why try to encourage players to 'settle for less' when upgrading ships as a goal (which I think should be apparent as rather contradictory)? Why place an emphasis on solely material hoarding in place of pursuing other gameplay loops as a means of progression?
One way I can take your train of thought here is that Frontier's designers have boxed themselves in with their thinking in such a way that they've trapped themselves; I'm hoping they will allow player feedback to perhaps pull them out of their box, in such a case.
For the same reason, the dispute between "Frontier need to buff credit earning - 500M/hour is too low" and "Frontier need to nerf credit earning - 1M/hour is too high" player beliefs is never resolvable (though Frontier have certainly picked a side in practice) because they're looking for fundamentally different game experiences.
I don't think there can be any denying that the credit situation has been a pandora's box of absolute mess - there's no dispute there, they have made credit earning trivial. The main issue is simply in informing the player on how to make credits, which in my view was the original problem all along. There are also several shifts away from the original vision with market commodities and values back during pre-release that I think contribute to the problem. Add on top of that a low quantity of ways to meaningfully spend credits, and it's not hard to see why dissatisfaction about the issue also continues to crop up. But I don't see it as analogous to the Engineering problem.
(The obvious compromise is to have a button in an out-of-the-way place [1] which if pressed gives you full material reserves and 100B credits. There is no penalty for pressing the button as often as you want to, but equally no requirement to press it even once. You can press it, I won't bother, now we're both happy enough with engineering apart from the excessive power gain it's too late to fix.)
Funny, but definitely has no place in any shared-universe experience.
And I refuse to accept that "it's too late". The issue is rather one of being willing to endure the pain of ripping the band-aids and curing the root of the problem.