TAnd for all I know, the Elite resurrected project I refused to back on kickstarter didn't impress anyone.
You are quite mistaken about that one. It has a very decent following for a pretty hardcore space sim and
sold north of 500K copies by the end of April. It only arrived on Steam on April 1, 2015 (after its original public release on December 16, 2014) so it's probably quite a bit farther north of 500K by now.
In fact, it's been in the Steam top 10 for many weeks in a row now (only interrupted by the summer sale). At full price.
Expansions and content updates are coming out on a regular basis. They are still sending out their newsletters (like the KS updates) every Friday and there is a lot of stuff coming up.
For example, FD will be heading to Gamescom and are currently preparing things for their next "major announcement".
The game has also been made available on Xbone Game Preview in June and a PS4 version should follow as soon as the Xbone exclusivity expires.
The release version was a little barebone but they never made a secret about that. They wanted to release a solid basis first within reasonable scope&budget and then build on top of it. They are doing a great job as far as I am concerned (I backed at Founder level). I haven't played much since January but I can't wait to get back to it once they have added significantly more content and features.
I definitely much prefer their MO over Chris Roberts' retarded feature creep MO. They are doing it right IMHO by setting realistic target goals and actually delivering stuff, too, instead of CR's let's-promise-everything-and-not-give-a-shit-about-how-or-when.