I see. Well, I can understand how it might feel like pay to win to speed up ship transfers or extend a mission timer. Those might be the wrong kind of idea for this business model. In this model, people pay for the expansion, and they get the full delivery of it at that time, or they pre-pay for it and get the full delivery of it when the launch date comes. Cosmetic sales pay for the maintenance and online aspects of the game (edit: or really it can be spent on any game the company wants). With this kind of model, it isn't guaranteed that they will use the money from the sale of the expansions or cosmetic sales for this particular game. Although, the hope is there.
It isn't like a AAA MMO with a large revenue stream. If they didn't develop anything else for this game, it would be fair because nobody pays for future content before it is released (or pre-paid for shortly before release).
what you describe could also be how Warframe works too, there is no guarantee that they money you spent goes to the operations and new content for Warframe, they could be using most/all of that money to do other suff... so pay to skip mechanics does not guarantee anything...
but we do know that pay to skip will make game design worse. you do not want to wait, so you are willing to spend your real money on the problem, and once you and many others start to do that, there is now an increased incentive from the developer to add even more wait times in the game.
Check out the huge difference between the Original "Dungeon Keeper" game, with the freemium mobile version of that very same game.. in the original game there was no wait times to talk about. but in the mobile version, the wait times where ridiculous...
So that how the took a fun existing old game, and mostly ruined it with added wait times... and as the time progressed, they made it worse! OK...
Lets look at a more recent game... Fallout 76. a real masterpiece, that got ruined hard, because they kept on lifting stuff out of the game, and put it behind paywalls... plenty of pay for convenience stuff. So here you have two developer teams, one that is trying to fix the mess that was launched, add he stuff from the todo list. And then you got the second, that was in charge of the cash shop, who tweaked the game, moved new stuff from the base game, and put it in the cash shop... Great, that is another studio do the same thing...
Lets look at another game, Elder Scrolls online. They added so many crafting stuff, so that you ran out of space very fast. now they sells you the solution, you just have to pay the monthly fee, and you get a crafting bag with infinite space! And of course some other perks, like a an XP boost, etc.
And we can go on, with examples, where games are being more and more ruined with cash shops to fix developer created issues. So instead of actually fixing what from the start might have been a mistake, now turns into, we sell the solution problem for real money, and since this most likely will work, the developer have now got incentives for doing this again... and again, and again...
