Haven't read the whole thread yet, but here are some thoughts I've had since 1.9 was announced. What has been announced about Legion so far is the Eve equivalent of mission running and ninja salvaging. The essence of the gameplay is good, but there's not enough meat in that to make a full game from. When it comes down to it people only became interested in Dust because of the tie-in to Eve and the potential for it to become an FPS where the results of a fight had meaning. What we've seen so far from Legion just isn't enough, which is likely why it still hasn't been given the green light as an actual game they're going to release.

So I think what is happening is they're working on ways to give Legion some meat for us to chew on. Which means some kind of significant interaction with Eve. The problem there is that CCP is in the middle of ripping the guts out of the sov system in Eve, which at the moment is kind of terrible. Sov battles in Eve are dramatic and fun to talk about, but actually participating in them is like hitting yourself in the nuts unless you're drunk or high. The problem is that the system is based around structures with timers, which inevitably results in the attempt to stuff as many nerds into one system as possible...which leads to soul crushing amounts of lag and battles that take ages to finish. People wind up setting alarm clocks for this stuff, and it just isn't fun. So what they want to do is change it so that ownership of a system is based on "occupancy". ie: if you're living somewhere, your groups is the sovereign entity.

But how do you define "living somewhere"? What does it look like when another group contests sovereignty? I'm sure CCP and the CSM have some good ideas rolling around, but things are far from worked out. In the meantime Shanghai is trying to figure out how Legion ties into this. This could be why we got 1.9 instead of a simple hotfix, with the delays created by the uncertainty of how major critical parts of Eve are going to work next year some parts of Legion just couldn't be worked on yet. That means developers with free cycles, and since Legion also runs on UE3 they were able to put some lipstick on the pig. In theory it should be possible to reuse at least some of that work in Legion, so it would be time well spent.