I cant agree with that. As I said, Elite is not a bad game, but if SC was like Elite, I would be very disappointed. Elite spends way too much development effort on polish and too little on implementing new features and content. Thats why it is "mile wide, inch deep".
Warning, cheap shot incoming: And this is different from SC how, exactly?
See, you can rightfully claim that the basic trading/bounty hunting/mining gameplay in ED is shallow, but what exactly is SC going to do that will avoid this? What are they going to do to the basic formulas inherent in those gameplay types to make them deep?
The problem with Star Citizen is not bugs, crashes, long loading times and lack of polish. Those things are to be expected in an alpha game heavily in development, and Id certainly rather play a broken build than nothing.
No, the problem is unclear direction, unclear concepts of what gameplay will be, seemingly no coherent business goals other than "sell more jpgs".
Oh, and bugs, crashes and long loading times.
The problem with Star Citizen is that many of its features are very delayed. We are nearing 4th year of development, and there is still no complete star system, only a handful of ship components and upgrades, many ship systems are still not implemented especially on bigger ships, there are only a handful of missions, there is no mining, space trucking, FPS is rudimentary etc.
You yourself have consistently claimed that development "is just getting started". When the original SC development plan was released, with a succession of modules each focussed on getting one aspect of the gameplay right and testing it out in a sandboxed environment, that was a reasonable plan.
And then CIG started ignoring that plan. Arena Commander is mostly abandoned, the social module was effectively cancelled, Star Marine Has Never Been A Thing, Citizen!, and now they're doing all development within that thing they call Crusader?
This is the core problem of SC development, not the fact that it is not user friendly and characters are deformed sometimes, lol.
Models getting deformed and collision detection going bad are core problems. They are things that Should Not Happen in a supposedly mature engine.
User friendliness is also a core problem
as soon as you decide to invite newcomers to the game. When it's just the backers, the lack of a tutorial is not a big deal. When you invite people to try your game out over a weekend, it very much is. When you do that, and you don't provide people with good ways to learn
how to move your spaceship and make it go fast to new places, then there are going to be a lot of people who will write your game off as an overly complicated mess.