I played Elite a lot, and played for no real reason other than the fact I enjoyed the game.
The reason I stopped playing is that - there's not much more for me to do as far as gameplay goes. This is an oversimplified answer though that doesn't do justice to my qualms with Elite. I been here since late 2015 circa 1.3. I was here when credit metas boomed and said that it would cause massive inflation early on. Which we saw with carriers. I said that Engineers was straight power creep - which resulted in all NPCs being adjusted for engineering constraints meaning that without it, you were SOL for doing anything combat related. I watched a lot of it get fixed up with 3.X updates and played a lot more from there.
I stopped playing because after attaining Elite Combat (my only elite) I sort of stopped caring. Small things in the game started becoming irritating. The idea (and even the tooltip) suggesting that crew-pilots take a FLAT CUT OF YOUR INCOME regardless of being active or not was the stupidest thing in the world. The very notion was frustratingly irritating and is amusing now that it yields very real losses to your income that have been magnified by the upfront cost of carriers. Somehow, since 2016 (or was it 2017?) people are still half defending it and has still seen no changes despite the fact it's such a poor design decision.
With Elite in combat I've done it all. I've flown unengineered vipers against engineered vessels and come out on top, used small and big ships for all sorts of combat content and got bored. But as soon as I tried to break the paradigms - the game just ended up spitting in your face. I love combat but 1: it's totally unvaried. All enemy ships fly exactly the same, give or take rank. 2: All enemy ships are unusually spongy and rarely have sense of self preservation and fly unimmersively and identical since 2.1.X updates. Fighting a "mostly harmless" engineered vessel is like trying to pull teeth - the enemies are absurdly tanky and spongy and take forever to kill no matter what angles you approach or sit in their face.
Many old ships are just outdated - the Asp had the role of being one of the best explorers in the game until it was completely superceded by the krait series of ships. The alliance ships are faster, stronger, and more variedly equipped than the federal-medium ships (objectively through stats and everything else) for no real reason. They have more base armor (65 hardness instead of 60 which makes them significantly tougher due to the way penetration and damage reduction works), while being lighter and far easier to maneuver. Multirole in Elite is also poorly done - there's no such thing as a multirole vessel anymore because unless the ship is already inherently a well maneuvering, well armed combat vessel, you have to give up slots to make them even remotely competitive. I tried, engineered, and did all sorts of combinations and found that you just ended up making a crappy combat vessel out of the original "multirole" ships like the Cobra and Asp. Trying to balance their configuration meant that they could barely even do missions. I have many suggestions to fix this but this isn't the thread for that.
Ultimately - bigger ships just ended up being better in nearly every way. Objectively speaking, unless you're doing PVP where there are a few more nuances, smaller ships often worse in 95% of any regular game activity. And I got bored of playing big ships, would hop to small ones, get frustrated with their lack of ability to do anything (huge cargo missions, huge combat missions, huge passenger missions, etc.) All that beautiful asset work in all those beautiful smaller vessels - going back to them is like shooting yourself in the kneecap. You're just more limited in every way possible. It's either the same 5-6 medium combat ships or the big ships.
And then there's the community - a lot of the suggestions and ideas people have regarding fixing the game don't bear in mind the constraints of games development. And most of it just comes down to complaining and wanting their bigger anaconda sooner. The worst part is - the lowest common denominator makes for VERY POOR GAME IDEAS/DEVELOPMENT SUGGESTIONS. And trying to argue against it is like fighting the tide - it's almost impossible. And let's not even talk about the toxicity involving PVP because that is another essay in of itself. I would argue they've done more to harm the game than anybody else.
I think Elite is a fun game in the end, but it's just so inherently flawed by slow development, bad initial ideas, and ultimately a very poor community. I think Elite made HUGE improvements with 3.x, which was a continuously positive slope which is where we've left off. But problems remain.
I'm back to playing now during these trying times, out of curiosity and all that. I still enjoy the game. I'm rediscovering some things I ignored because I have fresher eyes coming in. But that tooltip about how "inactive pilots still need to pay the bills so they take your money" set me off and sent me right back to these forums (I can't seem to find my old account so here we are in a fresh one) by sheer dumbfoundedness at the stupid things in this game that remind me why I left to begin with. But for now we're back to trying to enjoy this.