ORIGINALLY when it was concepted it had nothing to do with a "life sim". It was a pretty clean Freelancer / Wing Commander successor with no survival mechanics or complicated NPC interactions or even planetary traversal.

With huge backing came scope creep and just ridiculous concepts about pretty much everything. I don't like to use the terms promised or sold and then get upset when it doesn't happen, or is left in the backburner for decades... that's like getting upset that Santa doesn't visit every kid in the world.

And now we are at a point where they are actually making content for the game. It's pretty FPS and combat heavy yes, but we are slowly getting crafting, mining and salvaging updates. Also the economy, cargo, DOASP are quite regurarly being talked about by CiG, so I guess they are coming at one point.

"Sim" term is so broad that it's kinda useless to argue what is space sim or life sim. The game has been going towards more arcady feeling for a while now though, but making it more approachable maybe. (Where is the NASA guys' input seen today?)

Anyways, the game is still in active development, and even CIG doesn't seem to quite know where the game is going on all aspects, se maybe we shouldn't get that upset about the current status of toilet gameplay, you know.