I think there are some pretty solid reasons why certain types of people remain very interested in it. If you're a space sim nerd then it ticks a lot of boxes. I played it about a month ago for the first time, after a decade or so of mocking it every chance I got for all the usual reasons. I was looking for something new and saw enough videos that seemed to suggest it had reached a point of being interesting to me. My space nerd creds go back a long way: wing commander at release, freelancer, eve, various flavors of X3, elite, ten minutes in no man's sky, etc. I'm one of those people who wants to immerse into a game world where I can do all the things CIG promises. So I dove in.

What you can do is impressive. I'm not going into a detailed depiction, but people who've played the SC persistent universe know what I mean. It's somewhat mind blowing in scope. It's also heartbreaking because it's utterly broken in so many ways that no AAA studio that actually needed to sell new copies to new people would ever tolerate. I keep a list of the most egregious/humorous things that have happened to me from spawning in the middle of the sun for no reason, to having my ship blow away on the surface of a planet.

I think there are a lot of possible explanations for this, but I suspect the main ones combine scope creep, constant tech stack changes over a really long dev cycle, and not having to make a playable game to be rewarded financially. I hope some day it becomes playable, because it's really a neat platform, but I sort of doubt it ever will.