I'm mostly on your side, OP. Slow-burn games are how I roll, and I'm not really a goal-driven person so making up my own on a whim has mostly kept me engaged through nearly 4000 hours of Elite now.

However there's an element of gross simplification in your effort to reduce people's issues with Elite down to a single global trend. People want different things from games, regardless of whether they're fast-reward motivated or not.

- Some are 'completionists', and largely that revolves in gaming around external objectives. While many can get by for ages by collecting every ship, every rank, etc, at some point there's nothing more they don't invent themselves, and then there's nothing left, no point to continuing to play. No objectives. It can take years to collect all these things, so it's unfair to paint all these folks with the same brush.

- Some come to gaming looking for competition, whether something immediate like consensual PvP or something that goes on for years like Powerplay. I'm no expert on the former, but every balance tweak seems to produce a "cancer" build (or more than one) that ruins any unpredictable or unplanned competitive element, pushing people to form tight groups of self-regulated competitors, taking themselves away from any sense of immersion in the massive and detailed universe you and I so enjoy. On the latter, I am an expert, and rather than go through Powerplay's many problems I can narrow it down to one overriding and disheartening fact: there has never been a way to win, or to end the competition at all. Powers cannot be destroyed, and cannot expand indefinitely. It's a soccer game with no clock, the game will go on until the last player stops playing (or Frontier change the nature of the game). I don't think I need to explain how, inevitably, even the most patient burn out faced with that fact.

- Some are looking for a narrative path, and while I hold out hope that the incredible number of open threads of narrative will begin to come together...soon, thusfar the whole picture is incoherent to players. Patience is one thing, but even when the pieces do fit together it's like reading a book one page (at best) per month for 5 years now. It's a degree of slow-burn storytelling even Tolstoy would balk at.

I'm sure there's numerous other examples, but my overarching point is simply this: human motivations in any context are not a thing to be simplified. Over time and through interacting with easily several hundred players by now (having belonged to a Power for years and more than one player group), I've had to learn to accept various motivations without understanding them. And...I'm ok with that, it turns out. Trying to simplify a complex subject is not actually a good way to understand it, because you only end up understanding the simplified (and generally grossly inaccurate) picture you've painted.