Some things to keep in mind: Game developers, even the software people, don't make as much as you'd expect. It pays lower than virtually every other SE job out there barring maybe defense contractor employment.
Yes, but $10k - including rent, healthcare, hardware, retirement benefits, etc etc - isn't really that much of a cost. Seriously. In this case, it would also include things like marketing and producing the plot and cutscenes, lost money due to sick leave, paying subcontractors etc - divided per employee, of course.
Post-live monetization has been discussed and there's at least a rudimentary plan in place for how to handle it. I haven't heard anything about "mobile monetization", just additional pledge sales, purchasing credits for real cash, and I don't see them getting rid of the voluntary subscription model they have going on right now.
With 'mobile monetization' I meant things like allowing people to trade money for time - which seems pretty much what the plan here is as well. The thing is, though, that that model depends on the game part being free so that it's easy to get hooked. At least I can't think of many PC successes where you had to first pay to even play and then more purchases and/or grinding were required? LoL, WoT, are free, right? TF, CS:GO, Rocket League are all pay upfront and then it's at most esthetic IAP? Am I missing something obvious?
If anything, the massive amount of support Alpha 2.0 has received shows that players want to walk around their ships and live in a living, breathing universe.
But see, that's something that they still haven't showed one bit of (as far as I'm aware), and I'm still questioning whether that's even able to work at all like people are imagining. If it's not, that crowdfunding will dry up real quick, unfortunately.
I think you're projecting your own skepticism onto a massive audience, and also largely ignoring all the other gamers who want to take part in SC. This project wouldn't have had such massive surges in funding after Gamescom / CitizenCon / 2.0 release if people were uninterested in a unified first person experience.
Looking at this, it certainly seems like the last few months have been succesful on the crowdfunding front, raising over $5M in both November and December. However, I question the sustainability of that $5M/month, considering there were months with under $1M raised in 2015 (and none in 2014). I'd also argue that part - maybe even a major part - of this came from previous backers. Sunk cost fallacy is real, and ship sales etc pretty much only target that already existing donor base. I doubt that (targeting existing funders) is sustainable either, as (pretty much) everyone will get bored of any game eventually.
Maybe it is my skepticism, but I find playing around with the actual numbers that we know of to be very informative. I'm 100% sure that CIG is burning at least $2M/month, and certainly would need to keep the funding above at least that to stay in the black. That quite conservative estimate would translate to ~$66K/day pledged and looking at that spreadsheet, it's not at all uncommon for the daily amount to fall under that.
Either way, I'm hoping for the best as well. I just personally can't rationalize investing in it considering what I know about making networked games and the costs of AAA game dev.