Cloud Imperium Games is not your standard game developer, they are very committed to being in touch with the community. There are thousands of hours of development blogs/videos. So the game has not been abandoned.

Rust is the exact same way. The devs are constantly responding to Tweets @ them, they post nearly daily dev blogs, they make videos highlighting new features..

It's also a game that strives to do things never done before in games

Rust is the exact same way in this regard too. It was one of the first persistent-world MMO survival games. A lot of the things that we see in other early access survival games (Star Citizen included) were game mechanics pretty much invented by the Rust team.

Developers have no reason to actually push towards releasing their game. They can easily gross millions of dollars while still in "early access" and then just scoot off with the money. No obligations, no responsibility, no repercussions. It has happened before and it will continue to happen.