The fan base is very delusional and expects something that the game can never be. It's a mix of morons wanting Second Life in space, ARMA in space, some weird mil-sim shit, or big space rigging without combat and optional PvP. Its best bet is a more accessible first-person EVE Online with better combat. Anything else will be a failure. Something else that is impressive is the number of onlookers without a pot to piss in being concerned with how more financially successful people decide to waste their money.
I think the main point is that CIG tries to do something no other game tries to do which in turn gets them fans who are really into their game as there is nothing like it.
It's effectively blue ocean vs red ocean from marketing.
Red ocean is full of competition where you need to release polished product, you need to mind the price, customer support because otherwise your customer can walk out and buy somewhere else what you are doing.
CIG on other hand is swiming in blue ocean. There is no competition to what they are doing. And ever since they released 3.9 and allowed people to buy ships and wipes every patch stopped then their boat fully swam into it. CIG doesn't need to care about polish because their customers don't have anywhere to go. And you can easily see that by their $$$ numbers shooting into stratosphere pulling $100mil a year since that time.
Effectively people reward CIG for pursuing ambition even if meantime they get buggy/uncomplete product. Because that uncomplete/buggy product is still more fun for them to play than fully finished other product that has maybe 1/10 of features SC has and there are many games like that to begin with.
And this is true especially now because you can actually see the horizon ending instead of streatching into infinity.
There is set list of features to be implemented that is slowly coming down. Salvaging here, medical there and suddenly that list is now very managable and pretty short. In fact streatchgoal missing features list is pretty short now. It is CIG own new inventions beyond streatchgoals that popped up lately that are main limiters toward 1.0. Like servermeshing. Streatch goals never talked about unified world, they could do normal mmo like any other with instancing and it would fulfill that stretchgoal no problem.
