Persistence is key to getting more ppl involved in the game. Not the "leaving a cup in a forest" that Chris said, that's just fluff. The important bits are persistence of stuff you have like cargo, reputation, and mission chain progress! There's supposedly multi mission chains from mission givers, but I could never ever get to mission 2 or 3 because the server broke, it bugged out, or simply got disconnected. It means starting again everything that may be seen as progression, and progression is what woikd make the gameplay meaningful.
As far I can see, they will still be working on persistence in 2021, with Ssocs truly coming online next year, and potentially breaking it all over again.
I think they didn't push for persistence yet because it didn't make much sense. So many many things are broken, even the most basic things.
We have ship persistence right? It's meaningless cos if the game crashes while flying you have to claim it. If it runs out of ammo or fuel, the refueling system doesn't work 80% of the time, so you have to claim it... and so on. And then we have the limited content and space to play in, so making money is rather fast and easy if you are dedicated enough, so they couldn't tune the economy if they didnt reset what you made.
TLDR: Persistence might not be a hurdle on the coding side, but it is on the gameplay side. Things need to start working properly, and the economy needs to be balanced first, otherwise we are looking at a huge mess.
I do hope they can license out the tech they create, they can't keep selling ships at this rate for 10+ years. That's not a viable business model in the long term.
I'd rather pay the standard 15buck a month instead of having a f2p/p2w model.