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The information below is just my guess about what happened during the development of the game from a conceptual and software engineering point of view. I talk about some of the major challenges that had to be tackled by the dev team - which caused the delays and are the main reason for the current state of the game at EA release. Please be tolerant of my many suppositions. TLDR: cut the development team some slack.. they've worked a lot during the past years and we don't see most of the work yet. It will all be clear as we step through the roadmap and the game will speak for itself and for the team. Prototyping, refactoring, rewriting Based on things mentioned during interviews, I believe that KSP1 with mods was initially used for prototyping, then there was a major refactoring of the game after which the Star Theory drama happened.. which I think forced the devs to do a major / complete rewrite of the game. As you can imagine, after announcing delays, the developers probably wanted to do something more ambitious than just an improved version of KSP1. So... Interstellar - "simulating a multi-light-year spanning 3D volume at a sub-millimeter level of resolution" The "problem" with KSP is that it's played by very smart people that know and love science and technology. It's meant to be a realistic simulation of space travel and a lot of other things. This is kind of a trap for game design because it means avoiding instancing and other tricks. Blame Descartes for making us think about space as it's own thing (Cartesian system) instead of relationships between object. If spaceships were teleported from one star system to another we wouldn't have all the issues people complain about. But... "...we're enabling players to travel from planet A orbiting star B to planet C orbiting star D, continuously, without any loading screens, pauses, faked out transitions, "warp drives", or other trickery. We're simulating a multi-light-year spanning 3D volume at a sub-millimeter level of resolution, and enabling players to travel to any point in that space if they can build a ship capable of making the journey. Unprecedented in gaming." - Paul Furio, the Senior Engineering Manager / Technical Director at Intercept / Private Division, April 2022 This is why I wouldn't be quick to judge the work of Paul and the developers. They tackled something that is generally only done using supercomputers. We're talking about distances that are just incomprehensibly large for the human mind. It's a HARD problem and solving it is groundbreaking for gaming. Add the need for a trajectory solver that takes acceleration into account and it all gets very complicated. Multiplayer - solving the time-warp problem and delivery routes As many of you know, I've written about my wishes, dreams and theories related to multiplayer. I might be wrong, I might be right. After thinking about it .. a lot .. I have come to the conclusion that asynchronous multiplayer that allows time-warp in space (and other features like delivery routes) requires an innovative and complex system of recording events and placing them on a common timeline. If the devs chose this route, it is/was very hard to implement and I'm sure it took a lot of time. Actually, because it's built on top of the previously mentioned simulation system.. it's even more complicated. Early Access - stripping down the game for EA IMO this was done in a hurry and has generated the most bugs because you have to work around a lot of issues caused by the way fundamental systems interact in the game. Why was it done in a hurry? Your guess is as good as mine. But certainly the game would have benefited from another 2 months of testing and debugging. Is this reason enough to be disappointed or hostile? Of course not, bugs will be fixed. And then we also have: Creating the teams, processes and development pipeline Creating the new PQS system for celestial bodies (the textures and details are there in the internal builds, but there's not enough performance budget to use them for now) Parts mechanics for vehicles and colonies Physics (aero, liquid etc.) Creating / iterating the user interface (which seems to have been left to the last moment - which has generated bugs) Performance optimizations (this is usually done at the end of development and I don't think is the biggest issue for now) The scale of the project is GIGANTIC from a software development point of view. It's innovative work. So please cut the development team some slack and support them. Thank you, Paul Furio, for all your work! It will not go unnoticed and unappreciated by the community, I assure you. Have a listen to this older KSP2 related podcast with Nate and Paul: http://forum.purdueseds.space/pspodcast/episode2/ For specific dates please check out this great timeline created by @DrCHIVES.