I was also thinking recently along the lines that it evolved into nothing more than a scam for CRoberts & Friends to line their pocketbooks with. CIG has zero incentive to ever let this thing ever to leave "alpha" and every reason to keep it there. They can keep increasing the scope to infinity all the while the whales blow all their money on something that will never see beta, ever.
Really depends on how far they're able to push their tech...
A lot of companies at some time run into the problem that further development isn't such a financially fullfilling outlook. Which leads to cutbacks on spending but also on attempts to make things legally a lot more friendly for them. So they push the idea of how meaningless terms of Alpha/Beta are and how they've always planned to develop the game long after the 'release' version. Something like a year or a half later they'll release some 1.0. version that no longer bears the moniker with Alpha/Beta accompanied by another explanation of how they've basically just released the core version with them planning now on how to best put everything ingame that they weren't able until now.
And after that updates will become less and less frequent until it goes the natural lifetime cycle of any game.
But again that really depends upon the 'core tech' being there and it's just a few missing 'game loops' and 'optimisations' ("Yes only 50 players now, but when we get the optimisations down, we'll see XXXX players ...") - so theoretically achievable goals, which are in pacticallity most likely not achievable.
