Unfortunately, I have to agree... this should never have been released as EA... its just way too early..
the main issue here is 'reputation risk' , look at comments here, YouTube, and steam reviews... its a dumpster fire.
that reputation will take a lot of effort to now shake off... and you have also lost that initial launch day buzz.
for what? the developers knew its performance was bad, it had bugs... they don't need community feedback for that.
but oh well, thats their call, I don't mine that...
but what does worry me, as a dev, is I don't really buy the "it'll be optimised later".
sure, there is such a thing as premature optimisation, you don't overly optimise initial code,
and, yes, this would be true of an EA, and can be improved later...
BUT that does not mean you don't implement efficient code in the core from day 1.
no dev has time to completely re-write this code continuously, its only tweaked later.
if we are going to get 500+ parts craft, colonies etc...then that core design has to already be in place now.
it has to be designed to work at this larger scale.
so, even without the final optimisation, it should be handling 100 part craft easily.... that allows headroom for larger craft later.
so unfortunately this EA signals something worrying...
either the core design is no where near complete, or its not going to reach the goals that have been set.
this is where the EA fails for me... I don't mind missing features, even some bugs, thats kind of expected.
but I would have expected/hoped performance at this scale, would have been better than KSP1.
this would have left hope KSP2 foundation was solid for its future plans.
anyway, there is always hope.. but Id say we are at least a year away from KSP2 being KSP1 performance,
and frankly, that is when they should have released the EA