A rudimentary, minimum viable effort implementation designed to fill the pockets of the company is a win-win (for FD I guess)? I didn't realize the bar was set that low.
Actually, when you look at the competition...
Well it only really makes sense to go to one extreme or the other, i.e., either a minimum viable product or a proper fps game. A minimum viable product version of space legs would still serve a purpose and would be on par with the quality we've seen from FD for all of the other Elite content. Suggesting that they would give us anything more than that is just not credible so it makes sense to ask for something they could at least theoretically produce for us.
If you want to look at what proper space legs would involve, that is basically Star Citizen and they are still 2-3 years from a proper beta version. The technical challenges involved in that undertaking were absolutely massive, they had to literally re-write CryEngine to the point that it is basically a custom game engine. Even unifying the first and third-person perspectives was a massive technical achievement because no one has even tried to do that. There is no way that FD would invest even a fraction of the effort that would be required to make a "proper" space legs so a minimum viable product version is the only version we could possibly see in Elite.