I'm a backer with extensive game development experience, maybe I can offer some insight as to the game's state.

1. Feature creep

Most features were announced in the kickstarter. Things such as "hollywood voice actors" or "motion capture" were all part of the initial stretch goals. This is CIG delivering on the promises they made, there's been a bit of feature creep here and there certainly but not as much as people claim. I'm certain not all of it will make it to the release, FWIW, such is life in game development.

2. Finances

The game is extremely ambitious but it most definitely has the money for it. Its total budget is looking on-par with GTA5 which had a much, much more expensive marketing campaign and added costs. SC has the advantage of being crowdfunded and having an existing userbase, making it somewhat-riskless for anyone who would want to invest into it. CR has a lot of money of his own as well.

3. FUD

The studio has been repeatedly attacked by various parties that stand to gain if the game fails. One of those parties comes from a personal vendetta against Chris Roberts. If you enjoy drama, I highly recommend reading into it, it's fascinating (and quite depressing as well, you've been warned...). Quite a few mediocre news websites just want to jump on the Star Citizen hate-train because it's an easy shot and drives clicks, I find that appalling. Reading starts here [1].

4. State of development

The game is just about where you'd expect it to be. It's lacking content but they're pushing out the tech pretty hard. Parts of it are already playable, dogfighting/racing is a lot of fun. I don't play it myself. Most of the tech is out or about to be released; I estimate that, from the point where they'll start adding the actual content, maybe a year to release. I don't think they'll meet their deadline (autumn 2016 iirc?) but they've surprised me before.

5. Development process

CIG has been the most transparent game studio in the world. The blog [2] is regularly updated with tech, finance, design insights, in-game news etc. This sort of transparency and insight into the difficulties of running a game studio is why I'm rooting for them so hard. It's a model I want other studios to adopt. I highly recommend reading that blog even if you're not into the game, skip to the technical articles, they're great.

[1]. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14...

[2]. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link

PS: Someone else said in the thread, "even if it's a great game, many will be disappointed". Quite right. I'm very concerned by that; I think SC's greatest flaw is that it makes everybody think the world is being promised to them, and a lot of people are not realistic about the results. I personally think that even if they deliver on 20% of their promises, it'll be a kickass game, so I'm excited either way... but a lot of people won't feel that way.

I don't think the game will "kill" crowdfunding. From an investment point of view, it'll be regarded as a success no matter what happens. Maybe it'll kill high-budget crowdfunding but, remember, the game initially, on KS, asked for about 1% of what it has today. The crowdfunding discussion is a fascinating one to have, but SC is an outlier in every single category so I'm not sure it's fair to judge on that.