This is your problem FoxFour and CCP, how can you possibly run a successful business without a clear long-term strategy? Setting clear goals for 6 months, 12 months, as well as 2 years in advance is one of the most basic principles of running an effective business and anyone in any well run company will agree.
Without a clear vision for what your want your product to look like in 1 year from now you are unable to prioritize what to focus on today. I guarantee that if you took an honest look at your work process that you you find it massively inefficient due to many people constantly starting and stopping projects because there is no leadership or set goals to keep people on track towards a clear long-term vision.

When you say you "work on it until it's done" what does that mean? Until what is done, and by whom, and how does that person choose what to begin working on in the first place, and how can you tell when a started project should be put aside because a more important project needs to be worked on? These are questions that every member of your team asks everyday and no one has an answer for, therefore it makes your entire process as a business massively inefficient which breeds the constant anger you experience from all of us (your customers).

I'm going to give you a very important tip which comes from a desire to help my fellow man and not hate. Please read the book "Management Reset: Organizing for Sustainable Effectiveness" by Edward Lawler and take its principles to heart.

Thank you, it would be great if you could acknowledge that you have at least read this post, even if you disagree with it.

And my point is that you need to know exactly where your destination city is, it's exact coordinates, latitude and longitude so you always know what direction in which to build your road. As well as know exactly what your detestation city looks like, right down to the placement of the lampposts, so you know when you've arrived in the correct one. At this point CCP knows nothing about where they hope to arrive in a year from now, 2 years from now, or 10 years from now, which means absolutely nothing guides the day-to-day operations of building their road.

Look, CCP isn't the only company in the world that has tried to build a product that is difficult to build over long period of time, this has been done many times successfully, by many companies and the process on how to achieve success is easy to learn about. Have your read the book "Management Reset" and do you or anyone at CCP hold an MBA?

Of course every obstacle imaginable comes up when taking on a long-term project, which makes it even MORE important to know the precise location of where you hope to arrive, so that you can always correctly reorient your efforts when a tornado blows through your work-site.

Please give yourself and the people at CCP more credit, don't make excuses for why highly intelligent people have failed at completing their task, recognize past mistakes, correct them, and move forward. The people at CCP are intelligent enough to implement this process of accurate long-term goal setting, and when you make excuses for dead-ends and massive inefficiencies along the way you are insulting your own intelligence and not holding CCP accountable for any of their actions.

The process is the important part, whether you're referring to a single product, building a brand, or building a company. CCP does not have the correct process in place in order to achieve efficient, long-term success.

If you have a legitimate disagreement with the ideas I've stated, please, by all means respond with a logical counter-argument, but please don't insult your intelligence, my intelligence, and the intelligence of everyone on these forums by trying to derail the conversation into snarky meaningless questions.

Yes, and "Management Reset: Organizing for Sustainable Effectiveness" written in 2011, is entirely about eliminating the old ways of doing business. It encourages the process of rapid short-term reevaluation and being able to adapt to an ever more rapidly changing world. However, that does not mean that companies should not plan for the long-term. A company should have a 2 year plan. However, they recommend that if necessary, sometimes it is best for a company to scrap or completely change that 2 year plan.

But without long-term guiding principles and goals, you work in a vacuum never being able to tell when you've spent enough time on one task and should move onto another.
I highly recommend reading it or other books that cover a similar topic, if even for your own personal knowledge.

That depends, who are you sharing these plans with? If they are shared with customers who can point out flaws well in advance and might even be part of that process of completely overhauling long-term plans then it is probably in a company's best interest to share their plans.

Honestly, if CCP worked with the exact same process they are using now, but just told all of us exactly what they are doing they would receive far less hate, and be forgiven when something takes longer than initially expected. My worry, and point is that CCP themselves don't know exactly where they plan to be in the long-term and therefore are unable to tell us.