As far as I remember, KSP did keep pretty on top of engine updates. And I never thought the graphics were that bad, TBH. Sure, its not raytraced to hell and back, but I thought it looked just fine. However, there was a lot of physics jankery that never really got fixed (the kraken likes to eat complicated ships), and it did have performance issues in some areas. I think the community kinda wanted multiplayer and colonisation too, and the codebase was probably getting quite mangled and convoluted, making that hard. It would have been nice to see Squad get some time to be able to rework their systems over the course of a few updates, not really adding many features but focusing on performance and de-spaghettification, but I'm guessing Take-Two wouldn't see it the same way and just wanted MORE CONTENT, MORE SALES, MORE PROFIT