I know that for the past 3 or 4 years they've basically rebuilt the backend in micro services on K8s, so that they can scale the game horizontally and add the really crazy persistence features they have planned. I think they founded a separate company just to create this new graph database to support the persistence features as well. I think a lot of the delays have come from that work and wanting a game like Mass Effect, but where 100's of people could be playing and interacting with each other concurrently.

I only found SC a couple years ago during the height of the pandemic. I just had a great time flying around in the giant space ships with my friends and I haven't spent much money on it, so it's hard for me to be too upset about the delays.