Joshua, Star Citizen is, at best, an overpromising, incompetently led and shoddily developed game. At worst, it's an ongoing attempt to milk a couple whales in return for jpegs.
I have been defending CIG and SC for a long time on these forums. But then, with every. single. ****ing. release, they manage to erode what little is left of my confidence in them. Every single ****ing blog post, every single half-hour video they make where they say nothing, makes me want to trust these people less. Those allegations by Smart, or those bits of dirty laundry The Escapist dug up? They may not be true (DS in particular being rather guilty of overpromising in his campaign against CIG), but they have a ring of truthfulness to them.
Then there are the indisputable facts: CIG's management team, apart from the unholy triangle of Roberts, Gardiner and jesus-christ-WHY Lesnick, has undergone massive changes over the time this project has run. They're now at what, their third or fourth lead designer? Their community is unbelievably toxic, with Lesnick being an incompetent idiot who wouldn't know how to run a community if his life depended on it and SC supporters resembling nothing so much as an honest-to-god prosperity gospel cult who believe that they will be saved (=be playing SC), if only they continue to shower praise (=money) on the chosen prophet (=Christ Roberts).
And all while this is going on, we have an example of a game right in front of our eyes that does a LOT of what SC was promising to do (minus single-player cinematic campaign), developed for a fraction of the price, but released and turning a tidy profit for its developer, enough so that they regularly release big content updates that inch that game ever closer to what SC was promised to be initially. That game is Elite, of course, and it is what SC should be.