I said this in another thread, but this is a good place to reiterate.

As a good faith gesture, SD needs to commit to a longer support cycle.

The year of updates that Stardock has committed to this project should begin once they get the game stabilized, polish the UI and overly rough edges, and get the game to a level that is somewhat balanced.

Probably forever.  They're still updating Galciv2 and that's five years old.

It will be a long, long time. I get the feeling a few years. I mean, they aren't developing ANY other games for at LEAST a year so that they can update, and tweak Elemental. This is Brad's baby, and it's not going away any time soon.

They didn't commit a year. They committed at least a year. Labors of love tend to push longer than expected.

And like any good Garden, once the Seed is planted, only the patience gardener will reap the benefits. While the negative Nancies will get tired of weeding (a requirement of any productive garden) and simply give up and buy their garden in a bag...

Content-wise,  how  far  will they  go or do you  want  them  to  go? In other words,  do  you  think  they'll simple  add on or  even  replace, etc?

Then when I express discontentment, some small subset of the community treats me like I'm the one who did something wrong.

Even if you don't agree with the people who feel like they were sold a product that doesn't even exist yet, you should be able to see where they're coming from. 

They better not stop updating the game until it's the fucking spiritual successor to MOM that we were promised.

I enjoy the game as it is now but I signed on as a MOM fan. I don't expect them to make a MOM clone but it should still scratch that same itch.

Gal Civ 2 was aggressively supported for two- three years, with regular patches that addressed performance issues, significant game play and interface improvements, and two official expansions that significantly revitalized the game, with the final expansion resulting in almost an entirely new game (more like Gal Civ 2.75).

That's really the best, and only metric that need concern you.  If it doesn't reassure you, nothing else is going to.

No, no, you all have it wrong. It's more like ordering an italian sub (ham, salami, pepperoni, lettuce, italian dressing, various other vegetables), but instead you get a salad with italian dressing, some cold cuts, and a couple breadsticks. And then your friend, an accomplished modder - I mean, cook - leans over and points out that if you pile some of the salad and the cold cuts on the breadsticks you might have something approximating a sandwich. And then your other friend says, forget that, just eat the salad and we can stop by Civ5 - er, Subway - on the way home, perhaps when we come back next week this place will have better sandwiches. Meanwhile your third friend is trying to figure out why he wasn't given a fork and can't even eat his salad, apparently his OS and graphics card combine in a wierd way to produce a bug that ..

ah, hell, lost the analogy. I give up, Elemental is nothing like a salad.

Hmm, speaking of growing a garden ... I wonder how far along Wintersong's "Dying Sun" is going.