To put things in perspective, the development time for another of my favorite free-roam space games (EV:Nova) was about four years. Two of those as part time, then two more as full time with a development team. The scale of the game was enormous, and it had multiple complex, well fleshed out story lines. In fact, the strength of that game was its setting and campaign. Starsector is similar in that it's space based and open universe, but being a sandbox type game rather than a primarily story driven game, the feature set and universe need to be much, much more fleshed out for it to live up to its potential.
Point being, a game of this type is an ambitious project. Even for a small team of developers. You have to have a massive amount of content to keep players interested in playing, and an advanced and deep feature-set to take advantage of all that content. Conversely, you need a deep and complex feature set to keep the game interesting, and a massive amount of content to take advantage of those features. While the current galaxy isn't particularly large, it's clear that the intended scale of the game is huge. What Alex is trying to create is a rich, complex, living universe deep in character and history that immerses the player and provides many ways to play. I appreciate his attention to detail and quality oriented development. It has made for a game that, while currently somewhat sparse (though improving with each update), is very pleasant and engaging to play. On the other hand, the protracted update time is an easy to understand source of frustration for many players. At this point in the project, when the critical functionalities that will define the game are being developed, it makes sense though. It takes time to create and tweak these things. Once the framework is in place though, I would like to see a change of pace.
From there, it will be content and balancing. These updates can be small, frequent, and they are often no less enjoyable to a player than large feature based updates. The modding community adds extensive content, but that's a bonus and can't really be considered an attribute of the game.
I look forward to and eagerly await the next update, I check the website every week or so to see if it has come out, but it's certainly started to become a little discouraging recently. I don't even want to start messing with mods because I know they'll all be obsolete as soon as its out.