Leaving your biased explanation aside. I personally pledged on Star Citizen because i wanted to support Chris financially to make his dream game a reality. My pledge was supported by the fact that he also made Freelancer which i was pretty much enjoyed back in the day.
I am enjoying this journey. While most of the people who backed Star Citizen came in later. I was there from the very very beginning when CIG was 10 people. Watching them slowly grow and branch out is just amazing. Seeing those concept arts become a real product is just mind blowing to observe. CIG keeps the community up to date like no other company i have seen before. You get to know the people who work on all aspects of the game you see them you even meet them at events. The big thing that puts CIG apart from all other companies is that they really have this special bond with their fans.
Chris is crazy passionate and so is the rest of CIG. They love interacting with the fans and fans love interacting with them. So in the end i really enjoy the development of the game. Finally with the full production start in the end of 2013 / Beginning of 2014 we are seeing the first core module of the game which is great.
CIG came thus far and have a lot more ground to cover. When 0.8 came out i went in there and looked at it as an unfinished product because it is. From the sounds to the flight controls to controller support to hud a lot of the elements we see there are Work in progress. I have been on many many alphas and this for me was a pretty good alpha experience. But i was sure that CIG will improve this going forward well then Travis and some devs confirmed this. This is standard alpha procedure. CR and people from CIG many many many times said they are rolling out this module to get feedback and not because it is finished.
Regarding people's obsession with making this an Elite vs Star Citizen thing. I really have to say one thing both games are so different that they can't be compared at all. Comparing them would be just an unfair comparison to both. Some side info Frontier Developments has been around for so long and they got their game development structure done. They have private investors as well. So CIG had to do lot's of company things from scratch.
As i have witnessed the journey CIG started with a very small amount of devs in a little apartment in Austin, Texas. Chris never expected the crowdfunding to blow up like the way it did and that's why he didn't want to overspend money to scale up production quickly. He took his sweet time and played it safe.
Around the end of the summer in 2013 Chris was sure that he will and has enough money to expand and then he did. From around 100 people the whole project went up to 250 people in 8 months and reached full production schedule. So CIG had to oil the machine while Frontiers machine was rolling since 2 decades.
This is just a tiny bit that effected the productions times of both games. Add in Cry engine, Office movement delays, Outsourcing management delay and stuff like that and it becomes more apparent that there are several other reasons to why both games are at different production times.
Leaving that aside too. I believe most of the people in this forum want an Elite like experience from Star Citizen and i think that's wrong. Star Citizen is trying to be a unique experience just like Elite is aiming for and that's what's good about it. Doing things differently.
I pledged to Chris Robert's Star Citizen kickstarter not because i wanted a space game the way i wanted it but because i wanted a space game the way Chris Robert's wanted it.
And i will provide feedback through the materialization of his vision.
Have mercy please...can you add a tl;dr