It's been that way basically since it first was available, they make so much money on whales buying the expensive ships that they really don't seem to care about finishing the game.
They keep adding more and more paid content you can buy, while the game is barely playable with incredibly poor performance, and constant bugs like not being able to finish missions, cargo randomly disappearing, cargo glitching into ships and causing them to explode, etc... And the game is generally just extremely unstable with lots of crashes.
That's where Derek Smart went wrong, I guess. He actually released his game, not realising that you can just sell the hype vapour on its own. Rookie move.