So I got "gifted" a small forum break from above, and turned it into a longer, "step back" kind of break for contemplation. It's amazing how much more work I've put into personal projects since then lol. But in this period, I've reflected on my relationship with the project, my perspective, and the fact it's essentially come to stand in opposition to everything I value as an ICT professional. Not through malice or even incompetence, but through simple failure to manage the unsustainable over time. And so, my final thoughts before I step away - at least until Squadron 42 proves my pessimism wrong :wink: I walk away, not in anger, but in philosophical disagreement with what this project has become from a technical standpoint. After... 12 odd years, my patience has been breached. I work in DevOps, fighting daily against systems that collapse under their own complexity. My philosophy has evolved toward radical simplicity - tools under 500 lines that deploy instantly and run on minimal hardware. Star Citizen has become the antithesis of this approach. The game now requires: - 32GB RAM minimum for acceptable performance - 100GB+ storage that grows with each patch - High-end GPUs just to maintain stable framerates - Multi-minute loading times even on NVMe drives - Constant shader recompilation after updates This isn't optimization; it's capitulation to bloat. Every patch adds features while core systems remain broken. The development philosophy seems to be "add more" rather than "make it work." From a DevOps perspective, this is unsustainable. You cannot infinitely scale complexity without fundamental architecture refactoring. The game is becoming what I call "hostile architecture" - software that fights against its users AND new developers, through sheer technical burden. I've watched the community normalize this. "Just upgrade your RAM" became "Just buy a new GPU" became "Just wait for server meshing." We're enabling technical debt as a development model. I've been that guy myself! My work involves making broken systems functional through simplification, not endless addition. Seeing Star Citizen add another gameplay loop while basic elevator functionality remains broken after a decade is professionally painful. I wish the project well, but I can no longer support software that treats infinite complexity as inevitable rather than a failure of design. The dream of the universe sim has become a nightmare of technical overhead. To those still believing: I hope you get the game you're waiting for. But from a technical standpoint, I no longer believe the current trajectory can deliver it. To Chris, Jared, and the rest of the CIG crew: You've got a great idea, an amazing project... but you really need to firm up your vision on the desired outcomes. To those I have butted heads with or, rarely considering my contrarianism, outright agreed with - you all have made my life a little bit more dynamic, a little bit more broad in perspective. Keep up the conversations, but do keep it chill. Fly safe, but more importantly, deploy simple. P.S. No you can't have my ships, if nothing else it'll be a something I can probably hand down to my successors/grandkids. But mostly, I remain in hope that the project shatters my current conceptions and blows me out of the water with future developments.