Has 2.1 damaged ED?

I'm not taking a hiatus, I'm just pursuing doing exploration stuff now that we've taken the stations we wanted for IPEC.

My thoughts are...

A lot of long-term players have developed niggling gripes with the game, as generally happens with any game after a couple of hundred hours of playing it. For better or worse, 2.1 seemed to become the update that those players pinned their hopes upon to fix those niggles. Eg...

"The Galaxy feels lifeless and sterile - 2.1 will fix that, with NPC faces"
"Crime and punishment is a mess - 2.1 will fix that, with bounty hunters"
"Missions are boring and broken - 2.1 will fix that, with blah blah"

Et cetera.

I think that now that 2.1 has landed and proven itself to be just another imperfect content update rather than the panacea it was hyped to be those players feel even more disenfranchised. In short - ennui.

Very serious bugs haven't helped.

I don't think it's damaged it though. It's comparable to Powerplay - an annex to the core Elite vision, imperfectly executed to satisfy an audience David Braben probably didn't originally intend to cater to, plagued by long-term bugs - but something that lots of players get involved with anyway and on balance improves the game, warts and all.