I think it's the fact that obviously a sizeable lump of development went on a stand alone development, which could instead - had the desire been there - added some more involved gameplay in the core game.
It's three years, and we're only just getting Wing missions? Yet there was time to development a stand alone fighter game?
What if that effort had instead put fighter based combat gameplay in the core game? eg: Signing up for a tour of duty protecting/attack a location/asset. And if this had been offered with bots or indeed for PvP (in OPEN)?
We could right now be leveraging those assets to have fighter tours of duty trying to fight Thargoid scout ships etc while escorting convoys of civilians through asteroid fields to safety.
But instead? We have a lump of stand alone development effort collecting dust for the majority of the community.
I had great fun in CQC for a few weeks. But had it been in the core game, being used/leveraged in more and more ways, I'm certain I'd have got more out of that development effort, and ED would have been a more interesting experience now.
I guess it's just a different way of looking at things. I'm not a big fan of powerplay, but I don't begrudge the time taken to develop it. The game is still fairly successful and has quite a large user base, over a few different platforms. It might be less successful if people other than me weren't playing it, and they might be there because of stuff like Powerplay.... and Arena.