I just wish there was a way to prosecute him criminally for his fraud masked as a game creation company.
He has done stuff I would say qualifies as "shady" and it certainly appears that he is engaged in Hollywood accounting in an effort to artificially inflate his costs, but I don't think he's done anything that would qualify as "illegal". Of course, I ain't a lawyer.
When he made all of those outrageous claims it had to be lies. He had no way to fulfill what he promised. Incompetence explains a lot but people had to had told him that it was highly unlikely that he could create "his vision".
On the contrary - his "vision" (IMO) was achievable. But then he changed the scope.
As for his current vision....to a large degree, I would argue that it too can be achieved, albeit not in the manner in which he is developing things. There are certain constraints that would be a concern - such as 1000 player instances - but he has also taken care to "redefine" terms to suit himself. The base technology and systems and gameplay of his vision is certainly possible - games like ED and CODIW show that - but the manner in which CIG are trying to implement that vision seems less than optimal.
For all that Chris Roberts wants to do things differently, modern games development has developed certain rules and methodologies over the past 30 years because developers want to keep things simple. They want to keep things as bug free as possible. They want to avoid performance issues.
Chris Roberts moving ahead with game development even before his game engine was feature complete arguably helped with marketing and selling the game and raising funds because it gave him something shiny to sell, but it also means actual game development will be much more difficult and expensive, more prone to bugs and performance issues, much harder to adapt and fix. It is akin to building a house and then looking to build the foundations. Sure - you can do it if you throw enough money at it, and you might very well end up with a very nice house but it'll also cost a lot more and take a lot more time to build and be a lot more difficult.
But yes - I'll say Chris Roberts vision was, at least in broad terms, achievable. Which is partially why it is so aggravating that the entire project seems to be turning into a disaster through simple mismanagement and incompetence.
