KSP2 had all the warning signs of being a disaster ever since the initial delays and controversies with the original studio. Unfortunately, as usual, the community put on hype blinders until it became impossible to ignore.
Even the youtubers that got to play the prerelease version pulled out every excuse in the book to not present what they saw objectively.
I still check the sub every once in a while though, and it seems like nowadays the hopium/copium is mostly gone. Player numbers are embarrassingly low and even the "most of the game is already done, they just want feedback and will quickly add in the promised features after refining" argument from launch is also undeniably dead with the total lack of new content.
In terms of content creators, I very much appreciated Scott Manley having been up front with saying that he didn't recommend buying the game at launch given that he was THE original KSP-tuber.
While I was interested in the surface colony stuff they promised for KSP2, the addition of another star system you could travel to was very disappointing. Not so much another system, but that you could travel to it. One thing I liked was that KSP was somewhat grounded in real physics. Practical interstellar travel just isn’t. (“bUt WiTh ALcUbIeRrE dRiVeS…” smack Shut up. They’re a fantasy.)
What they did so far showed they have nowhere near skill to pull it off
That's not really a huge leap. The issue really is, as it is with many things, scope creep. In KSP2's case, it's scope creep to such an extent where, they have long forgotten what people loved about the original whimsy rocket building game.
Like, better graphics really just needed to be better textures, and to make round things actually round. Good physics just needed to be "stuff doesn't randomly explode or become unstable while at rest". They absolutely could have done this... they just... didn't.
I don't think that's the case. They clearly want to re-create the KSP1 things before going into more advanced stuff, the problem is that they can't even do that.
Like, from the pitch it does seem that they know what players want, like starting from the get go with procedural wings, VAB improvements etc. but from results it's clear they don't have the chops
Which means they've ended up in an awful state where even if they were competant (which they are not), best case things might not be much better.
You're right they marketed it as a full re-write to avoid the problems ("Slay the Kraken"), but what was delivered was trash.
I don't understand what they are trying to do with KSP2 to begin with. Skeptical from the start and it somehow turned out worse.