Some context; as someone who pledged in 2012. I'd hope the OP doesn't come off as dismissive to the "hard unglamorous" stuff, since I see this as a separate issue. For me at least, the problem is largely that in the last 6 years, we've gotten PILES of UX revisions, all of which favor form over function to a laughable degree. This map, while pretty, is fractionally as useful as a flattened stretchy-grid-auto-layouted hairball. It lacks basic features like being able to _zoom out to actually see the whole volume without rotating_, let alone functionality in companion apps to competitor games[0], not to mention that to render the UX my significantly overpowered dev box is chugging away quite hard. Meanwhile, the core gameplay systems have, by many fans perceptions, degraded in quality, and prior deliverable dates have been slipped to levels that would get me fired in my position.
Again, I don't want to sell short the difficulty of the engine work they're trying to do, and frankly I should probably keep separate my grievances about deadline-meeting (although that certainly throws salt on the metaphorical wound). But to my eyes this is in the same vein as the complaints I see about other web products, "you have something good, polish but then don't fix what aint broke", while echoing a trope Star Citizen inflicted on itself from its very first "Iron Man" HUD design.[1] (reviled for being piles of overdesigned spinny widgets, and very little functionality).
[0]http://evemaps.dotlan.net
[1]http://i.imgur.com/4gMaYpu.gif
Again, I don't want to sell short the difficulty of the engine work they're trying to do, and frankly I should probably keep separate my grievances about deadline-meeting (although that certainly throws salt on the metaphorical wound). But to my eyes this is in the same vein as the complaints I see about other web products, "you have something good, polish but then don't fix what aint broke", while echoing a trope Star Citizen inflicted on itself from its very first "Iron Man" HUD design.[1] (reviled for being piles of overdesigned spinny widgets, and very little functionality).
[0]http://evemaps.dotlan.net
[1]http://i.imgur.com/4gMaYpu.gif