The fact that both Sandro and DB say it is technically difficult stuns me. They made this game online only, from the ground up, and they never thought that people would actually want to play together in an organized fashion?? What a total lack of foresight to now have programmed themselves into a corner where all rests on people playing a 1/4 developed MC (combat but no exploration, mining or substantial trade functionality) if they ever want a more thorough multiplayer experience.
I'm quite distraught at this revelation.
I am not sure your qualifications of what you perceive to be FD's failures are justified.
I did not hear them say it is impossible, just that it will cost an investment of time (and money of course).
To make that investment FD will try to determine whether this feature is worth investing more in and whether it should be a priority.
Personally I do hope it is not a priority, because for me almost everything else you can come up with is much more important than any multiplayer feature.
I do not care about multiplayer at all and I think the pure soloists have gotten the short end of the stick lately as far as big new features are concerned.
As a soloist I would love to be able to wing up with npc or have a full NPC crew on my ships for example. I strongly feel some form of npc crew should have been part of 2.3. It would be relatively easy to implement compared to the multiplayer version of it.