As a game developer myself, I really struggle doing post updating the community. Is much harder (for me) than developing the game itself. Because most of the time you just work on code and things you have no way to show. You literally have nothing to show, but maybe you wrote 2000 lines code or you fixed countless bugs on a feature the community doesn't even know exists and that looks like will never be completed. In my full time job I work as a financial software programmer, and sometime you really waste months and years in stuff like that, things you cannot show in a demo to make customers "happy".
The issue with Space Engine is being too much ambitious, especially when the developer was alone. Now being a team we don't really know what's happening in there and what they're working on, if they're working on something at all. And maybe if they could answer they would always answer with the same thing they said months ago, because that's how developing a software is.