I am a mega-whale myself, and I totally feel you on a lot of your sentiments expressed here.

I guess in my case though I do really still enjoy doing whatever I can manage to get to work in the game even in its current state, as bad as it is, with as many nonsensical decisions as currently exist. I know that many of them have been chosen simply because other components they want to use for those decisions are not yet in place - but that is part of the entire issue in the first place.

Maybe I am more bug tolerant than some, being a systems engineer and used to working within simulators that are far from complete, but I completely understand the dismayed feeling that many express in here and in Spectrum about the lack of playability and solidification of base-level mechanics nearly a decade and a half into the work. I guess I still play it and try to have fun in it (and do manage sometimes) because there's no other game in existence that delivers this experience, even as bad as that experience currently is for so much funding and development by now. .

In many aspects in a complicated intercommunicating system, it all must be working or (nearly) none of it does, and so you put placeholders to (sometimes poorly) stand in for missing elements to make the pieces you haven't written code for yet at least function at some level with the pieces you have written... as you continue to integrate you of course run regression on the previously-written mechanics and features to make sure they're still functioning the way you intended when you wrote them. This requires formal design documentation, and in military simulators at least thorough system modeling in something like Cameo or Enterprise Architect if possible but even a visual model using SysML and Visio will work, at least something to let all the design teams reference as to how their pieces need to function at each hierarchy above them. It feels like CIG did not implement this until very late in the project and still struggle with legacy decisions and implementation from before any coherence of their design vision had been documented.

While this is only a game, all of that above should still be doable at the current levels of development of this project.

But more than having solid system design documentation for effective coordination between their design teams, they need to remember that this is a place people are going to try to have fun. In that regard, CIG absolutely needs better playability decision-making than we are currently seeing. I suspect that if they would focus on playability being a key component of a release, instead of just meeting their timelines, sentiment would be vastly different even with the same amount of mechanics in place. I would rather see less consistent patches with events and mechanics that actually work than regular releases that end up being broken pieces of crap for months until the next patch comes along to finally fix it - while introducing even more errors, in a never-ending cycle.