This is fundamentally untrue. CCP is plenty competent.
If you read game review aggregators like Steam (which has a statistically-relevant amount of reviews), player opinions on EVE that are negative can be broken down like this:
New Players:
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The game has a monthly subscription, which is P2W garbage. EVE should be free, and $20 is too much to pay for a game in 20xx. The devs are greedy, and “Tencent” is just trying to milk whatever they can from idiots before shutting down the servers for good.
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The game allows you to get attacked and lose all your progress, which you can’t save. Every time you undock, you instantly die to griefers. Griefers are everywhere. In fact, basically 97% of the server’s population is griefers and their alts. These griefers constantly harass and attack the few remaining players this game has who are just trying to log in and relax after a hard day of work. CCP is always encouraging the griefers to grief the poor new players. Most of the devs are probably griefers themselves. I was griefed twenty-three times by these basement-dwelling virgins in the 36 minutes I played the game before uninstalling it.
Veteran Players:
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A repeat of the cost argument, but with an emphasis on EVE just not being worth the price, as opposed to anger with it costing anything to begin with.
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The game lacks depth. The gameplay loop has been effectively reduced to the sole act of trying to accumulate wealth. Any remaining sense of exploration and wonder has been snuffed out by the reduction of the gameplay loop to a simple “grind to replace whatever you lost in the TiDi fleet battle, or just for the sake of grinding.” We can’t create our own content anymore because gameplay mechanics simply don’t support that, and CCP isn’t adding content of their own to make up for this either.
The second veteran argument makes a lot of sense to me, and is how I feel. CCP willingly made a lot of changes that stripped the game of its soul. For example, in their mad dash to address “griefing” about a decade ago (see: CrimeWatch, CCP Greyscale’s/Soundwave’s design methodology), one thing they did was allow players to “take control of friendly fire.”
Great idea, in principle. But aside from the fact that awoxing was relatively uncommon, it had an additioncal effect. Before the change, players invested time and effort into getting to know potential/new recruits in order to form more cohesive units and prevent these incidents. After the change, they no longer had to. The amount of engagement that corporate leadership has with its member base went down significantly. These days you just get let in, and then it’s “go mine or do whatever.” Less connection and less interaction all around. The corporate experience is no longer as deep and socially-fulfilling as it was in the first decade of the game. Players are just cogs in a machine, generating tax revenue for the well-connected elites. The rise of groups like SICO, PH, and other multiple multi-thousand-member, war-immune alliances, was likely a direct result of this change.
But the change didn’t come about due to incompetence. It was very much intended, and even its effects were intended as a means of driving revenue via the creation of additional alts that players would need to vertically integrate their industrial operations now that they wouldn’t make as many mutually-beneficial business relationships within their groups.