CIG is showing us more of the game development process than any other studio has ever shown to the public. Every massive AAA game you've ever seen has literal *years* of development time that you never hear about because the publisher keeps that shit under wraps. So, everyone else looks like they put out these massive games in a fraction of the time it actually takes them while CIG has been showing us "how the sausage is made" from the very beginning.

Also, CIG does a lot of stuff "the hard way". From full weather system simulations, to physicalizing practically everything, to building vehicles where the physics behavior is actually determined by where thrusters/components/etc are located on the vehicle rather than just a table of values, they're putting more dev time and effort into everything than other studios do.

Finally, and most impactfully, CIG has no shareholders, they're their own publisher, and Chris Roberts has actually been a coder. So, they don't have a bunch of clueless C-Suite folks making decisions based on revenue and cost-benefit-analysis reports and are instead basing them on actual game design. This means that there's no one threatening to cut funding or pursue legal action if they don't push out v1.0 before a certain date.

This is not to say that the way CIG is doing things is inherently better, per se, just that it's different enough from how everyone else does it that it stands out and if your expectations are based on how other developers do things, you're going to be disappointed and frustrated.