But that doesn't contradict what cletus said. Even if they wanted to be ambitious, with such a large scale there simply is no way there isn't some way to carve

But that doesn't contradict what cletus said. Even if they wanted to be ambitious, with such a large scale there simply is no way there isn't some way to carve out a coherent core to deliver early and then iterate on. I've done some ambitious things in my engineering career... nothing like Star Citizen in absolute scope but relative to the resources I had they were ambitious. But I always made sure there was some core I could show off before the project was complete. If nothing else, Agile (by which I mean more the orginal manifesto rather than any specific thing like "scrum") recommends this sort of approach for a reason. The more parts you develop in isolation in your "ambitious" project, the higher the odds are that when it comes time to put them all together, they won't go together. Games have the extra problem that they can both technically fail to go together as expected, but they can also artistically fail to go together as well, making it even riskier to do this in gaming. Many is the game where the obvious fault lines between the various pieces are plainly visible in the final product. (Heck, The Ubisoft Game™ that they keep remaking and just slapping new skins on is all but a game structure designed to make this approach possible, which is basically why they keep remaking it over and over; it's not that they're artistically committed to it, it's that they've probably structured their entire game making organization around it and the rest is just Conway's Law.) I still see little reason to expect Star Citizen to ever be anything like the hopes and dreams. I still expect that whatever finally comes out of this process will be profoundly disappointing. The process just can't work.