I agree wholeheartedly, and I've long been pondering something along these lines. For a time, I was invited to work with a group of people on a project like you describe.
Unfortunately, we kept hitting the exact same wall each time we attempted to collate any meaningful data: where do we begin?
It's not an easy question to answer. Everything about this project has been egregiously mismanaged from the ground up - every possible aspect of the development is absolutely beyond compare in any industry, not only the games industry.
Therein lies one of the central problems when trying to define the scope and/or progress of the project through the lens of game development. You can't compare Star Citizen to other games because of a number of factors:
1) Star Citizen is not a game, nor is it yet a proper IP. There is no scope, no plan, no proposed game loop, no economy, no defined plan for income beyond donations, no functioning engine, no functioning netcode. Because nobody has bothered to define the boundaries of what Star Citizen will, and more importantly, will not be, the game, in the purest sense, is impossible to create.
2) Star Citizen has spent all of their money on cinematics that show whatever they want, because no game mechanics have been designed, and ship concepts and models, because those are what keep people paying them money. What every other game company considers the foundation of a game (game loop, engine, and netcode), Star Citizen considers an afterthought. They're building the house from the roof down, and so any comparisons to proper development simply won't apply.
3) Star Citizen is set up as a dictatorship with one of the most inept, unskilled, unimaginative, and untalented people in the industry today at its head. Every single bad decision, and every single failure of this project from every conceivable angle can be laid directly at his feet. There are parallels in the industry for this, but nothing even approaching this scope.
4) The toxic cult surrounding the project is quite literally unprecedented not only in gaming, but in nearly any industry outside of organized religion. It would be a pretty tall order to offer perspective of a company whose primary source of financial income is deceiving the mentally unbalanced. How would we put that in perspective that the average person would understand?
This project is an unprecedented disaster. A man with no qualifications (in fact someone who is uniquely anti-qualified) has tricked people out of over $100 million dollars to do something he, and the people under him, have no idea how to do. It's a hell of a spectacle, but I firmly believe that only once it collapses will the post-mortem coverage become a reasonable goal.
There's just too much dysfunction here to disseminate the details in a digestible format. The scope of Chris Roberts' failure is something I can imagine people taking two years of graduate school to fully comprehend.
