Star Citizen is vapourware. It's the Chinese Democracy of games.
I wish it was. IT would be much nicer time for me not spending time checking up on it every once in while, seeing all the progress they made and then again realize that even with this much progress game is years away.
The thing is that game does improve a lot from year to year it is just that the scale and ambition they have is something that is hardly possible to do in reasonable timeframe.
I mean we are at the point where devs are adding real time fire mechanic to all things which will be based on materials used. So if you have luxury ship with wood on it you will have a chance of catching fire that will realistically spread over surfaces, reaching critical temperatures to start melting other stuff etc. and you as player will have to fix that either via decompression if you are in space (which will also depend on source of fire) or using actual fire extinguishers.
On one hand i want to see that but on other hand this is more dev time.
Similar story with ship components. All current ships treat components (like engines, stealth module, power cores) like status effects. But in next update or next one all of them will become physicality on ships, meaning that someone can actually break into ship and for example steal your power core or cut off part of the ship from power or you will be able to find some very expensive module on some ship wreck and take it for yourself.
They are building system upon system upon systems and you wonder when they will end. Everytime you think yep this feature should be "gold" they come up with something new that obviously is better but requires dev time.
Ships themselves are actually on their 3rd revision for some. Meaning that ship was made back in 2014 then they redid it in 2016-17 and then again in 2020. UI ? There literally will be 3rd revision of it next patch. First one was pretty cool, it was unique per ship etc but it iwas super work intensive and they scrapped it replacing it with MFDs for all ships that look the same. Now they will redid UIs for ships but do unique uis per manufacturer instead of ship. This was also needed because their whole system around displays, ui etc got complete reworked into their new Building Blocks system that allows them rapidly prototype and ship very good uis for all things and they have to either way scrap old uis...
SC is basically game that is being worked on as it goes. On one side it is good because it shows that developers don't mind improving stuff but on other hand it takes time. On one side game as it was in 2016 was looking amazing and they could easily set it asa standard and make content but then again 2021 one looks miles better and it is way more fun to "play" with all new additions and frankly without those i wouldn't consider playing SC at all.
It is very old engineering style where they try stuff, see if it works and if not then they rework it, replace it and then comes something along the way that is more important after a while they go back to that point which they were replacing and decide that with their new knowledge they can do even better job.