And all I am saying is that I find it funny when people are all so sure about how a project will turn out before the fact ... and pretend to know exactly who is repeating what mistakes and what not ...
Personally I think the biggest thing to consider when analyzing a developer is his track record.
If this was a Peter Molyneux game for example, would more people consider the lofty goals to be a bit far-fetched? Would there be more doom saying?
So if Robert's last game sunk his company, and he hasn't done anything in 10-14 years since then, and his new game is the same as his old game only more ambitious in every respect then isn't there legitimate cause for concern?
Similarly people complain when for example a single player game has a tacked-on multiplayer component, they say why spend time on this when you could be improving the main game? Yet Star Citizen for example has basically added on an entirely new game with the FPS aspect. Which is quite an ironic turn of events when you think about it considering the original pitch was essentially championing the space sim and yet the final game is tacking on an FPS. Would people applaud a Freespace 3 which puts half its budget into a cover-based shooter like Gears of War?
The FPS module reminds me of another game actually, Daikatana. When John Romero split from iD his plan for Daikatana was all kinds of ambitious. But later on, having missed his first deadline he got a look at Quake 1 and saw that Carmack had added lighting effects to projectiles and other new tech, so Romero was like "**** I need to improve the game and get that lighting in there!" and the game got delayed, people quit, etcetera and so forth.
Now with Star Citizen, as I understand it Star Marine was announced at PAX 2014. Is it possible that Roberts saw say No Man's Sky in 2013, saw a man walk around on a planet, get into a ship, fly into a space battle and land on another planet and suddenly think "**** I need to improve the game and get FPS in there!". Maybe the time line doesn't quite match up but either way it seems by going for the FPS component the game has nearly doubled in scope. I know there was talk of walking around your ship and getting into your hangar and so forth, but if you're going to have planetary fights as well that is going to require a lot of environmental and technical work.
Something to be said for defining a scope and sticking to it.