If you can't be assed to remember what other forum, I sure as hell an't be arsed to look for it either.
i did not imply you had to do it
The funny/sad thing is that the background economy was in place during alpha/beta. You had goods prices fluctuating when someone mentioned a trade route on the forums. Other happened according to time of day (afternoon/evening in american midwest, superconductor prices plummeted on the stations that normally paid well because some kwan truckers were mining a trade loop etc. They just didn't scale in any way after the starter bubble was popped ane people went in a million different directions. I played for months after release, and I didn't experience "pretty much everything" as broken. You'll have to name examples. The closest I got to broken was a russian hacker using instakill guns. But I mostly played in private or solo mode so meh.
nothing worked in the first few months. there were countless threads all over the official forums. hell, the Mercs of Dickunn, one of FDev's darling little human factions, continuously reported on the broken state of the BGS. flipping didn't work (until you opened a ticket and FDev manually corrected it), changing states didn't work etc. you know, the whole of the background sim.
hell, there were a couple of weeks (months?) when the economy was completely static because they couldn't fix it (and even after they supposedly fixed it, it was still pretty static. i distinctly remember doing some testing myself [i already had a Clipper, so it was some time in february if not later], maybe i can even find my notes, i wrote down the prices of a couple of commodities between 2 stations and the supply/demand numbers, and while the prices dropped by tiny amounts once the transaction was complete, they reset once you came back to the station). if i'm remembering things correctly, i believe they even said the "dynamic" (lol) economy wasn't properly enabled or something until they manually flipped the switch some time in early 2015 (around 1.1?)
Multiplayer was pretty barebones, but as far as I can tell it did what was promised. To be honest, text chat while flying always feels a bit weird. Maybe if there was an autopilot and a #SpaceTruckers chatroom people would use it.
chat was broken even when in the main menu. i pretty much couldn't communicate in-game with IRL friends until wings came out. it was completely fucked until 1.2 and if you never had problems with it, you were one of the lucky ones
and i don't know how you can justify that "it did what was promised" when nothing was specifically promised, it was just marketed as an MMO but it lacked
basic functionalities for 3-4 months (functionalities which were lacklustrely implemented in the first place, and pretty much never improved in the 16(?) months that passed).
You could toggle a flag to go for fewest jumps rather than least fuel and it went a lot faster. I think 20ish seconds was the worst plotting time I had. I'll concede the 100ly distance felt a bit limiting. But I was using a 3rd party trade app so I already had my route laid out for me anyway when I went trucking.
i always used "fastest route" and plotting near the 100ly limit was notoriously awful. there's even vids around (if people didn't delete them) of people trying to plot routes a couple dozen ly near the core and the game taking a good couple of minutes. man, the best optimization of my favourite (and most profitable) rare trade route back then was pre-planning the route so i could plot it by ~50ly instead of 100 so i don't have to lose minutes between the longer legs
I was playing throughout those winter holidays and didn't have any trouble except for release day when logging in took 2-3 minutes.
i played as well, and distinctly remember a whole weekend being lost because their server team was on holidays as well. can't remember exactly when but it was a pretty decently sized shitstorm (it was when they fucked up so bad they accidentally gave shittons of money to some players. first week of january iirc) and it was the main drive behind them doing that whole "server status" page/indicator on launcher
) in more detail, but i can't be arsed to go look for it. off of the top of my head, i only remember naming ships. i know, relatively minor, but it's hilarious (in a bad way) that it's still not in after almost 2 years. i can go look for more, but not today 
