Peeeling is 100% correct. Star Citizen development has been managed very poorly. What we are seeing now with the development of the cloud-based infracstructure, for example, should have been the first priority since it is the foundation for everything else. This "boring" foundation development should have been 2012/2013 priority material, not 2016.
Instead, CIG focused their development on fast results and around a ship pipeline beginning with the fancy JPEG concepts.
In short, they followed a purely revenue orientated project plan and not a long term project plan driven by the ultimate goal to deliver the full scope PU.
One could write novels about this but quick examples would be the many ship iterations and reworks. All of that is usually stuff that would be done post-release when the devs are fine-tuning, iterating, rebalancing and so on.
Or a game mode like racing. CIG did this because it was relatively quick to implement along with Arena Commander but in any normal game development, racing would have had very low priority.
Do the vast majority of the people want to race or do they rather want to trade, smuggle, bounty-hunt, mine, play a pirate etc. etc. etc.? Right.
It is because of this short term goal revenue driven development process that Star Citizen is now a clusterfuck of a project. CIG now somehow needs to turn the ocean liner around and attempt to optimize their processes for a longer term full scope content delivery plan but -no surprise- they are struggling hard against their chairman's piss-poor decisions of the past.
Frontier naturally did a much better job in that regard. They always had a long term vision for Elite Dangerous, released a basic version and are now delivering the full vision update by update for as long as people keep buying the expansions.
This is another advantage compared to SC. If E:D goes tits up, people will still have a fairly solid game to play (e.g. the 400bn star systems will not be fully explored during our lifetime or that of our children and grandchildren either ...
it will take roughly 20,000 years!).
If SC runs out of funding or it suddenly dries up, well, I know CR claims that they could still "finish" the game but that is definitely 100% bullshit with 300 employees on the payroll and you can not downscale so easily after you have upscaled so massively. Not possible. Changing the workflows and majorly reversing the project schedule would take a tremendous effort that would not magically lead to faster content delivery. Quite the opposite. Things would get even more chaotic and collapse faster.
Anyway, if SC goes tits up, then you don't even really have a basic version of what was promised for the foreseeable future (remember... we will still be at only 1 single star system until about early or mid 2018).
So, you can say about Frontier or E:D what you want, like how the cockpits are ugly with the pee-yellow colors or how you hate David Braben's fancy glasses and that 400bn star systems sucks because YOU can not explore them all even if you played 24/7 for the rest of your life, BUT in terms of project planning E:D is objectively the vastly better managed project.
On a high level (long term project plan), Frontier are doing it exactly right and contrary to CR's usual inane random babbling when he loses himself in his pipedream fantasies like how you will hide in a cargo container and sneak on board a ship to shoot the pilot and hijack/steal the ship, it is a joy to listen to David Braben's very intelligent, very realistic (or often times British understatement even), factual statements when he talks about E:D.
Braben knows exactly what he wants and whether it can or will be done and he doesn't shy away from simply saying 'nope' to the gamers while Roberts 99% of the time says "oh that is something we definitely want to, sort of, look into in the future", no matter how crazy the idea might be.
If SC would have been driven by a project plan focused on content delivery, we'd be much further along today. We might not be at $120+ million and maybe we would have a little less FIDELITEH and no other Hollywood actors in S42 except Hamill but all of that would be fixable by the success of the game. CIG could have always prettified and polished things post-release like any sane developer would have done.
But it is what it is... we must live with this clusterfuck caused by revenue-driven development where fast results, ship JPEGS and "OMG-so-exciting-reveals" for game/community shows have always taken precedence over everything else which is now biting CIG in the ass massively.