To begin with, the argument that the game is made with kickstarter funds is invalid - game's initial budget was $12.7M, of which 2.5 were raised from kickstarter. Kickstarter money were probably enough to buy back Elite brand and pay for promotional materials - that is.
Then, Frontier Development has 200 employees according to their homepage. I won't elaborate on calculations for brevity's sake, but burn-rate in gamedev is about 10000$ per employee per month, 120000$ per year. If quarter of that staff worked on Elite for 2 years, that would be $12M which doesn't even include costs for minimal marketing and servers. In other words, they would have to borrow money from investors. Now imagine Braben going to bank and asking money for remake of 30 years old singleplayer game for PC. It wouldn't happen. Instead he probably told them "blah-blah persistent online world, blah-blah unique fluid drop-in drop-out shared experience, blah-blah pioneering support for Oculus Rift recently bought by Facebook for 1 billion, we will release Chris Roberts' 60 million worth game before he does, blah-blah". So Braben gets money, we get an MMO. Sorry, but this is how modern gaming landscape works.
In the end, even if game is likely to crash and burn and servers to get closed, we still get assets and engine, and patching a server emulator around them is easier than porting Oolite to UE4 engine with enthusiast coders. So cheers.
Then, Frontier Development has 200 employees according to their homepage. I won't elaborate on calculations for brevity's sake, but burn-rate in gamedev is about 10000$ per employee per month, 120000$ per year. If quarter of that staff worked on Elite for 2 years, that would be $12M which doesn't even include costs for minimal marketing and servers. In other words, they would have to borrow money from investors. Now imagine Braben going to bank and asking money for remake of 30 years old singleplayer game for PC. It wouldn't happen. Instead he probably told them "blah-blah persistent online world, blah-blah unique fluid drop-in drop-out shared experience, blah-blah pioneering support for Oculus Rift recently bought by Facebook for 1 billion, we will release Chris Roberts' 60 million worth game before he does, blah-blah". So Braben gets money, we get an MMO. Sorry, but this is how modern gaming landscape works.
In the end, even if game is likely to crash and burn and servers to get closed, we still get assets and engine, and patching a server emulator around them is easier than porting Oolite to UE4 engine with enthusiast coders. So cheers.