I get that Star Citizen is extremely up your alley, but there's a lot of colorful language in your post about how much of an advancement this is or how it's doing so much more than some other game (pretty difficult to make apples to apples comparisons about number of features in a cowboy game), and let me just summarize that as being very subjective. What we can actually play and get hands on is a game that, after all this time, has some rough technical performance and plenty of bugs, paid in exchange for features that offer only diminishing returns as you expand the circle of the game's audience out further from the people looking for the strictest simulation. Starfield couldn't get 60 FPS on console, even skipping 80% of the minutiae that SC is targeting, and Red Dead Redemption II also took flak and criticism for how the game felt to play for prioritizing a lot of simulation-y things as well. Those games aren't immune to criticism either, and they were able to come from teams who had successfully built acclaimed games in the past, iterating on them.

Also, that "8 years" is in all likelihood including several years of greyboxing, engine work that's reusable for future projects, and other pre-production work with a skeleton crew, while most of the studio was at work on GTAV and its own secondary MMO alongside the single player. Cyberpunk 2077 was announced back in 2012 with a CG trailer, but I distinctly remember a Giant Bomb interview with a CDPR designer in ~2014 ahead of the Witcher 3's launch. Of course most of CDPR wasn't working on Cyberpunk yet. Jeff Gerstmann asked what Cyberpunk was looking like at that time, and the CDPR rep just responded that it was a stack of design documents a foot high off the desk.

If people are aware they are getting an IOU, that’s not exploitive.

It is. For all the reasons that everyone says not to pre-order video games, pre-ordering a ship that you don't even know when you'll really be able to use it is exploitative, and it's priced to cash in on whales. At least it's not a blind box preying on gambling impulses, but I still find it to be gross.

The very least you can do is stop gaslighting. Every step of the way people have been stepping back their criticism, they’ll say this features not coming and then it does and they drop it off their list, they say it’s a scam and now it’s suddenly “Well of course it’s was never a scam, no one would actually think that.”

Don't attribute to me what others have said. Plenty of other people have called this a scam, but right at the top, I said that never made sense to me. Maybe a few weeks ago, I said something right here on the fediverse that someone interpreted to be too positive about Star Citizen, and the next response was to ask me how much I paid into the game. Those people probably haven't changed their minds. I am not them. I think for myself. That is not me gaslighting you. It's me having a different opinion than someone else you spoke to.