On the contrary, I think it was by far CIG's biggest mistake. They should have cut off all avenues for funding when they thought they had enough (at around $65M). It is impossible to manage a project when the budget keeps expanding, and it is impossible for CIG to be truly honest with the backers so long as future income depends on what they say.
That doesn't make much sense from a business point of view now does it? You don't stop people from giving you money if they are willing to.
Star Citizen business model rely's on crowdfunding, continuous backing and income as allowed them to develop things that otherwise wouldn't be possible and I think that the majority of their backers understands and embraces that. There's only one chance in making this. This is it. CIG is a one company game and Star Citizen is Chris Roberts only child.
However,
it is generally a good idea to develop game rules and mechanics before worrying too much about the highly polished assets 
. SC is in danger of being a virtual theme park rather than a game.
Usually designers think about gameplay, engineers program ways to make them feasible, Artists model the assets, sound guys do their thing etc.
When making huge games these things are usually done at the same time because the company's have the human resources to do it, and refactoring is due, any game development studio as scrapped work for some reason or another, it's part of it. The core design documents and game developing intentions in early stages are always bound to change, with or without polished assets.
For instance (pun*intended), Diablo was supposed to be a turn based game in it's original design doc. World of Warcraft cities were refactored many times over until they finally settled their designs. Titan mmorpg was refactored into Overwatch, and this is from what is considered one of the best and most quality demanding studios in the industry.
Game Development
Is indeed an ongoing process with what seems a lot of "wasted time and money" but that it's necessary and inevitable when developing ground breaking stuff.
I'm glad that you have had fun in the game. You say you don't think it's bad, just an alpha, and not even a normal alpha where everything is 90% done and feature complete (sounds more like a beta to me
). Given you linked to an article saying that games look like "complete ****" for 90% of their production,
do you think that all the alphas to date have been "complete ****"? Do you foresee many years of "complete ****" to come? If so, you might have some sympathy for other people who are concerned about the huge amount of money going to a company with no released products, a musty, creaky pedigree, and only "complete ****" to show since the first alpha release over 3 years ago.
I'm not anti SC myself, and I would love for it to be a great game. I've seen a few glimmers. But I totally understand anyone who's written the game off entirely.
Also, reading that article, does it not strike you as odd that CIG did almost the exact opposite approach?
Well I have fun in what is available to test because I see it by what it already allows me to do on a technical point. The graphical detail, the attention to the small things, the huge seamless map with no loading screens, the ability to go inside ships, roam whenever I like with no restraints to a vehicle or absence of gravity.
The thing is that Star Citizen is as close to a real alpha that most people have tried, if you ask the backers of other crowdfunding ambitious games they will tell you their own horror stories of absolutely horrible performance, game breaking bugs, sync issues, lacking audio feedback and so on.
Whenever you see a "closed alpha" for any of the big game studios like EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard etc it's not really an alpha in the sense that they are still developing mechanics and deciding on heavy gameplay mechanics. They are mostly using that alpha to test their servers and gather some player feedback about map design/weapon balance through telemetry WHILE raising interest to their game.
I look at other games and their development to put things in perspective. For example, ESO took around 7 years to make. 7 years!
That was with an established studio funded by a private investor and a well known franchise with set lore and story arch's.
ESO is a cookie cutter fantasy mmo with a good effort into Storyline questing but that's about it in terms of gameplay.
Star Citizen, for me is a mmo with a much bigger scope and ambition and they are still doing Squadron 42 at the same time. This would be a monumental task to ANY top studio even more so for a company that 5 years ago only had a dozen of folks and no facilities to work on.
Star Citizen development method has to accommodate it's funding method, that means that what is shown has to look good even if it doesn't necessarily play's good right away. This also helps dealing with optimization along the way. If you just test stuff with low quality assets and focus solely on the gameplay you run the risk of when you try to "update" the graphics that your game takes a considerably performance hit, just as an example.
