All that said... it's really time-consuming to build, collect and analyze that kind of data, and a lot of it will tell you the obvious or lead to bad conclusions.
You can build data-analysis tools that give out ELO for a given ship design, for example, but it's pretty worthless if the real reason it's "OP" is because it's a fan favorite because of how it looks and gets more play-time dedicated to it, rather than how balanced it actually is.
Like, for example, the Enforcer, which is one of the best ships in the Vanilla game (imho) vs. the Hammerhead. I suspect that a lot more newbies gravitate to the Hammerhead, simply because of the iconic design, vs. the ugly look of the Enforcer. So Hammerhead ELO (when averaged across all players, all player-times) is probably superior.
The above trend is probably especially pernicious during the early stages of development, because a lot of planned things that will influence final balance don't exist yet.
TBH, I think it's worth a lot more to the developer to spend more time interacting with the customers. I get much more worried when I see Indie developers get into their shells and quit paying attention to feedback than I do if their front-end website isn't fancy enough
![Smiley :)](https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/Smileys/default/smiley.gif)
On the release dates / milestones issues, I don't really have any complaints. Most of the stuff that takes a long time takes a long time for obvious reasons (building major framework stuff is not fast, getting it polished enough to present is even less fast, and there is only one coder on this thing).
If this was a project with a 2-4 coder team, that's a little different. I've often wondered if this wouldn't go a bit smoother with a second coder on the team, tasked with polishing areas where the fundamental design is done so that Alex can do the big initiatives and not have to keep returning to areas where time allocation says, "no" but feedback says, "yes".
But that's something that largely comes down to money, and there isn't tons of it to throw around. Alex isn't starving to death or looking over cardboard boxes for their insulating properties, but I'm sure he's having months where he wonders whether he can fix his car.
That said, I'm quite sure that taking the title to Steam Greenlight or Kickstarter, or both, would address that pretty easily; the game's gotten this far and has pretty solid fundamentals based largely on word-of-mouth, and a major update will put the game back into the limelight in terms of getting some free press. The money's there, in short. Alex doesn't want to do that, and that's a business decision; I'm sure there are good reasons for that, starting with over-exposing a game a little too early and risking negative feedback trauma.