Life should have taught you by now that every game gets stale eventually. If you don't want to risk that while a game is unfinished you should not play EA games. YOUR responsibility, not that of TFP.You could probably list 200 games you're not excited about anymore, but how many of those games have been stuck in Early Access for long years and for how many of those games you personally receive early updates, while most other players don't? You know, it's always easy to call it "the natural course of existence", but your position isn't the same as his, is it? I would have agreed with you if the game was already finished, I would have agreed with you also if people weren't stuck with the same unfinished version for a year without seeing any actual progress, but in this case I just feel like you've been the insider for too long to understand the regular player's point of view. No offense.
There is no guaranteed time-frame for EA. Neither for the time between versions nor for the entire process. Incidentally there is not even enough precedent cases to make reliable rules of thumb. If you just guess wildly and ignore basic rules of statistics (i.e. sample size for reliable prediction) and you guess wrong, guess who should take reponsibility for that mistake too.