The problem is there is no gaming media.

A proper games media that wasn't corporate bootlickers would explain to people that building core tech from the ground up that literally didn't exist before this game came into development takes a long time.

Just like Gears of War wasn't just built from nothing, it had nearly ten years of lead-time with the original Unreal Engine used for the various Unreal and Unreal Tournament games that preceded it. But no one thinks about the platform and tools required over the course of a decade to make Gears of War a reality, they just think that whenever asset creation started is when game development started.

In short, Star Citizen wanted high-fidelity ground-to-space flight with real-time weather, atmospheric changes, and dynamic flight models depending on whether you were in atmosphere or space. They also wanted a fully persistent MMO environment. The tech for all of that didn't exist at the scale they wanted to do in when development properly got underway in 2014, so they had to build all of that from the ground up (thankfully stuff like global illumination and procedural IK were already implemented into the CryEngine).

It took them several years to finish the planet tech, and the last two big hurdles are persistence (which they're about to start testing soon), and server-meshing (so thousands of players can all occupy the expanding solar systems at the same time).

I get why a lot of people are frustrated that there isn't more there, but a lot of that boils down to not having a proper, informational games media to explain why it takes so long to build, test and iterate some of this technology to scale.

Sadly, there has been so much misinformation and media sabotaging going on, that no amount of informing the general public at this point will ever make a difference. To their credit, what is available to play in Star Citizen runs absolute massive circles around every other AAA game out there right now, despite being buggy and janky.