Yeah, its silly money.
It was about £45 for CitCon in 2015, albeit for a 2h show, with a basic goodie bag, and free drink at the bar.
Now its £240 for a 2 day event, and so for a significant amount of people thats going to require a hotel or similar, then travel & food on top.
I live in Manchester, and still found it too expensive to justify.
I think the issue is if they went back to shorter events, its probably harder for people to justify travelling overseas to one for a 3h event, but making it 2 full days at a large venue means its not going to be cheap.
That said, they've sold all the tickets (pretty sure they were still on sale the day of the last CitCon) so...
Its not stalling though is it, its them struggling to get something to work and push it out within their original timetable, but this just seems to be them recognising major releases are a little sparse because they're BIG patches not minor ones dressed up as major ones.
Given the size of 3.23s planned content, i'd say its worthy of being a milestone release like 4.0.
By calling it v3.24 they get to refresh the ship rental list (adding the San'tok.yai i think) and release the rest of the features that didnt make 3.23
Delays to 4.0 sucks, but its something we're all pretty much used to now. I remember people joking about how the game probably wouldnt be released until around this time, said ironically, and here we all are, very little has changed except we're all older... MUCH older.
What sucks is to begin with CIGs vision for SC was exactly what i wanted to see from the industry, i had zero interest in space games at the time, but i backed because it was doing something i wished more developers would do, which was making a complex meaningful game, rather than a shallow one or a carbon copy reskin of their last game etc. However its hard to say this is the solution, either. I suspect if CIG knew they'd get to a point where they were bringing in around $100m/yr, their scope could have been more realistic, because it feels like it started out as an indie game with a big scope, and as the money rolled in, it had to be redone to Triple-A standards, and now its going to get comparisons to GTA5/GTA6 for production time & cost/funding and measured against that, when it started as a small team making a game with a $2-15m budget. The funding has been both a blessing and a nightmare.
