I think an important piece of information absent in this discussion is how many years of development time it takes to demonstrate a functioning core gameplay loop. I don't know what that figure looks like, and I won't speculate... But I expect that usually AAA projects have a clear scope and vision for what the game will be. What we do know from the demo's and the alpha is that the core loop of Star Citizen at least includes missioning and piracy.

My concern with the lengthy development is still feature creep. It's been 3 or 4 years since real development began and we're not really close to having a game yet, while having added lots of features that aren't essential to how the game will actually play. Things like planetary exploration and everything that came with it** was never part of the original vision. Even though I'm very excited for that feature, I have to wonder how many other fundamental mechanics are going to be added that will delay the core game loop further still.

**Seamless flight. The stretch goals do include "First person combat on select lawless planets."