I'm also a software engineer by trade. I had huge doubts from the beginning, because the scope they were promising seemed like way too ambitious - especially the persistent / networked parts of it. Also, as an EVE veteran, I really question the core design decision of SC being an 'FPS/simulator' - most EVE players don't care about walking around on the planets/hangars/spacestations (most of the time they just need to get what they want quickly and get out) and most D514 players don't care about the space part, they just want to shoot and kill each other.

Remember this is a groundbreaking game that is only a couple of years into development. We get to see it, warts and all. By contrast, Half-Life 2 took 5 years. Homeworld 2 took 4. I have no idea how long Eve took but definitely at least 2 years.

Well, it's been 3,5 years now. The other question is how long will the money last? It was, what, $107M by the last announcement. If we assume the price for one developer to be around $10k/month (total cost, so includes things like rent, hardware etc), their team of 270+ would cost at least $2.7M/month, which would mean the $100M would last for a bit over 3 years with that team size. Obviously the team was much smaller in the beginning so the burn rate wasn't as high as it is now, but I personally would feel quite uneasy with the numbers being provided if I was calling the shots, especially as the plan for monetization after the release is very unclear too. Will people who are happy to contribute right now keep on contributing when the game is finally released when it might not match what they imagined it to be? It seems like they are trying to monetize it through mobile monetization strategies which - to me - is a huge gamble in itself, even more so if those ballpark figures above are anywhere close to reality.

Hopefully, the development behind the scenes is much farther along than what they're showing, because I'd really hate for this project to fail, for a myriad of reasons.