Perspective: 3.0 is the second-to-last phase in SC's development

This started as a post in another post but I thought I'd add to the cacophony of "3.0 slipped!" posts. I don't mind if it goes down under a mountain of glorious downvotes, but I think it's relevant.

tl;dr: 3.0 is actually the second-to-last phase in Star Citizen's MMO development.

Given 3.0's slipped dates and [totally rational] disappointment amongst the backers right now, what people need to realize is that what we're getting in 3.0 is an entirely different experience altogether than what we have in 2.6, which is an incredibly good thing. 3.0 touches essentially everything about the project, from the player field of view to gigantic planets to land on. It's about bringing Star Citizen to the second-to-last-phase of development.

Up until now we've nearly completed 4/6 Tiers:

Tier 1: Hangar Module: You can walk around in the engine and look at your ship in a ~1km area. The first experience of Star Citizen.

Tier 2: Dogfighting Module/Arena Commander: Flying + Combat + Racing, establishing basics of spaceflight and starting to understand how to build ships so that they are fun and functional. Multiplayer free flight mode was added in order to start understanding + analyzing how players would interact with each other in an unrestricted environment necessary for creating a successful MMO. This was added to with:

Tier 3: Social Module/Area 18 + Star Marine: They needed to have some baseline for understanding how landing zones will work, so they just needed to get something down. Area 18 allowed them to put players in a free environment and interact with shops and other players, giving them some data in order to start planning out all other landing zones. They also needed this data to get ready for:

Tier 4 (CURRENT): Planet Crusader/2.x. This was a small prototype of the Persistent Universe. It added a region of unrestricted space travel around the first planet in Star Citizen, Crusader. And so in a very limited way, it brought all of the prototypes built up to that point into one singular experience. You could spawn and walk around your ship just like Tier 1, you could dogfight PvP or PvE like in Tier 2, and you could walk around and interact/fight with other players as you could in Tier 3. All 100% seamlessly; no loading screens of any kind. But that was only the start; they needed to take this idea and move on to:

Tier 5: The Stanton System/3.x This tier is all about taking the 2.0 prototype and turning into an MMO. CIG now has mountains of data about how players are experiencing the game and they have a roadmap of how to mold that into something playable. As stated above, 3.0 changes essentially all of the existing features in 2.6. Everything from player animations + flight model to bringing in NPCs and creating an interactive environment with Item 2.0. mobiGlas, planetary landings, and eventually professions like cargo, mining, repair, etc will be introduced and iterated on with subsequent 3.x releases. And of course bringing in the ability to seamlessly land at Hero locations like Area 18 is going to be the biggest feature release in Tier 5. During this 3.x time they will fully build out an entire, massive solar system, and we should expect to be tooling around in the Stanton System for some time; probably 9-12 months I would guess, regardless of Chris' estimates :) doing missions and living in the Stanton System...just playing the game. During this time CIG creates the netcode to allow for all of the players SC will need, meanwhile coding + bugfixing like hell, preparing for...

Tier 6: The Full Experience/Other Star Systems/4.x. This is the final alpha tier. It takes what they've learned from players in an entire solar system and adds the ability to travel to other solar systems via Jump Points. They will tighten up the netcode to allow for all of this to occur, and tighten up the game features so that it retains the correct depth of gameplay while minimizing the complexity (i.e. CIG will need to do to SC what apple did with the MP3 player...take an incredibly complex idea and turn it into one fun and easy to use product), as Chris Roberts has said, he wants SC to be like StarCraft: easy to play, hard to master. 4.x will be all about getting Star Citizen ready to ship. Final features will be added and CIG prepares for:

Star Citizen Release. The game releases to a mass audience, and CIG continues to support the game by adding star systems and improving features, patching, and generally running the game. Eventually they start adding classic MMO elements like raids and/or periodic GM-generated mass-player events like Vanduul invaders or a universal alien evil like The Flood for people to battle. Meanwhile Citizens of the SC universe do whatever they want, and the rest is history.

EDIT: Great discussion everybody. A lot of people had a lot of really good points. What was originally posted is of course optimistic, and perhaps oversimplified. As many have pointed out, this does not take fully into account a lot of bigger issues, i.e. StarNetwork which is a major aspect of the game, capital ship combat which will undoubtedly take a very long time to get right given SC's level of complexity, and it doesn't take into account that after 4.x there will likely be a lengthy beta period. However we really don't know what life is going to be like post 4.x, so perhaps that's best left untouched for the time being. Either way we've been on this road for almost 5 years now, and the next few years will be the most exciting. 3.x will be a lot of fun to try out, and before the PU releases we also have SQ42 Episode 1 to look forward to (hopefully, lol) so we've got a long road ahead but it should be fun along the way.