Lengthy post inbound, if you intend to respond, read the lot:
Elite suffers from problems symptomatic of a game that has a set of tasks but no real goal to orient itself around and a poorly thought out approach to resolving the question of orientation. In an MMO space, the goal is your own personal power and the projection of that power into the gamespace, in a singleplayer game, the goal is the completion of the objectives the developer sets out for you in order to consume the content on offer, in "open ended" games, the intent rests somewhere between the two. The rough idea of an open ended game is it has content sufficient for players to get involved and engaged in, and a systemic toolbox that allows it to be engaging on a continual and repetitive level, but at the same time, without the defined conclusion of say, a "fixed" singleplayer game. World of Warcraft's "non raid" content is a good example of Open Ended/MMO type mechanics (I won't say they've always made a good job of it, Warlords of Draenor for example was pretty bloody awful, but it seems they took that lesson to heart).
This is broadly the same space that Elite Dangerous positions itself in as it lacks a fixed set of goals for the player, and requires the player to figure out what they want to achieve, and leaves them to get on with it. The problem is that Frontier would rather have the player fill this question in themselves because it's cheaper (they looked at EVE and went "That works, we can basically do that!") and less taxing on development, however they've not orientated the game around the concept of player driven content, or MMO design orientation either (this is evident by the design of the netcode and the absolute lack of social tools of any meaningful kind, not even getting into the discussion of guilds, which is something I won't touch on here). Players are willing to pick up the slack when there's a good core "something", or at least enough of a good core for the Playerbase to just not walk away on the spot, even if there are numerous issues that could and should be resolved. It's why we have things like SEPP, the Fuel Rats, Jaques, and so on.
Here's the issue, and it's a big one, the initial game of Elite (1984) tasked you with getting to Elite Status, but it left you to get on with it however you wished. In Elite Dangerous, you're projected into an ever-present, ever-living space, with a lot of the MMO constraints, but none of the MMO benefits. You're still tasked with that really simplistic goal by today's standards (Get to Elite), except now you've got the hazards of dealing with patches altering the gameplay experience dramatically, features rendering season passes all but required, and when you boil things down, you're still dealing with some pretty rudimentary systems that hold the whole thing together. When you are grinding out for your bigger ship, you get the bigger ship and then you start over to do what? Get a bigger ship, ad infinitum.
The BGS which was supposed to be the big draw of this massively persistent online world is... I'll be kind and say "Something a college student could create in Access" albeit on a slightly bigger scale, the 1:1 galaxy spinup (which remember, is mostly proc gen) is a lot more impressive but then you're faced with the No Man's Sky problem - you have this mind bogglingly huge galaxy and less than 1% is inhabited. Consider that. Less than 1%. The rest is empty space and exploration data. As impressive an achievement as it might be, it's as meaningless as the claim of NMS saying it has 18 quintillion stars - it doesn't matter if most of it is meaningless noise. You'd be better off with a far smaller chunk of space (say 500,000 star systems) which were actually centered around an inhabited area of some kind and had stuff going on in and around them.
Now it's far from all bad, the Flight Model is unsurpassed, and I doubt anyone will ever get close to what ED has achieved either on a visual or audial level. There's a sense of atmosphere that you just can't replicate in any other game, and I have a sense that this will remain the case for quite some time to come, but this was something they honed to a razor sharp point right the way back before 1.0, and it's not exactly changed much since release, it's still a joy to fly and you can really sense the difference in handling characteristics with the various craft, particularly with a flight stick. This is the big selling point of Elite Dangerous, it's the magic that keeps everyone coming back, BUT, it's not going to keep everyone coming back indefinitely, or infinitely.
So Frontier have to evolve and develop, they have the flight model, they have -something-, but that's the issue, it's not orientated around a specific design ethos. It's just "stuff to do" that's bolted on randomly in the hope something will suddenly stick to make the whole lot suddenly make sense. Powerplay was supposed to add factional play and a second layer to the BGS but it's largely ignored unless a player wants to grind out a specific ship, it's not -fun- or -interesting-, it's just something tacked on. Then comes CQC, which thankfully the technology has been recycled back in as ship launched fighters but otherwise it's safe to say it's a total loss, it was supposed to advertise the game to the console audience but it really wasn't representative at all. This is the pattern that Frontier have set since 1.0, with every major content update, they don't have coherency, or even solid ideas, they have things they throw against the wall in the hope it's going to stick, and more often than not it fails.
It fails because Frontier pick the path of least resistance. This was most evident with Engineers, which was Frontier's answer to the crafting question. Rather than introduce a stable, reliable crafting pipeline where : Raw Material A > Widget B > Complex Item C > Finished Good D could be followed and traders could utilise those production chains to make a profit by following them through and filling out orders on various worlds, and indeed, creating a much needed role for miners who could supply those raw materials and prime the pump for those trade routes, instead we got... well... "Craft casino tickets by hunting down really irritating items that may or may not pop up in missions and unlock engineers by completing KERAZEE tasks like flying 1/4 of the way to Jaques!" (Yes Palin, I'm looking at you). Rather than bring some sanity into the economy and create some genuine realism (deities forbid!) we get insane scavenger hunts for upgrades that unbalance the game in such a way that now everyone needs to fit the damn things.
This is the root cause of why things keep going wrong, Frontier picks easy solutions to complicated problems (people can't get to the action easily, solution? INSTAWARP! *JAZZHANDS*), the easy solutions inevitably create the kind of fallout easy solutions provide, and rather than taking the time to do things right, Frontier would rather do things quick and dirty, because it's cheap, and it means they don't have to invest a lot of money. All the while they keep hawking ship skins and trim kits. Because clearly your cobra needs spoilers. If that isn't a clear enough statement about the state of the game, then I'm not sure what is.
