Ah, I didn't phrase my comment very well. The ur-example attitude I was referring to was some YouTube "personality"'s description of Starbound being better in every way than Terraria, because (insert featurelist here). The problem was it quickly devolved into attacks on Terraria for having the gall to not be Starbound. I wanted to get across that, had there been no Terraria, chances are pretty high that we wouldn't have Starbound. I *strongly* suspect that Redigit planned to stop supporting the game months before the announcement and gave Tiy his blessing to leave Re-Logic and begin work on Starbound.
I also don't think the comparisons between the two as equivalent products are fair. Terraria was done with Redigit coding, Tiy doing spritework, Blue doing PR, and the guy-whose-name-I-forget doing the soundtrack. Starbound has
more than twice that just on the base team, with another 10 people listed as major contributors. All of them benefit from Terraria's shortcomings and Tiy's experience working on a mechanically similar project. And they all have a large imported userbase to draw on.
I'm not saying Terraria was flawless; I just don't understand the basis for judging it inferior to Starbound, when Starbound came about as a direct result of knowing what Terraria could have done better and working with a larger team and more resources to build on that established base. Terraria, Model T Fords, and DOOM all came about in their own time from their own circumstances, and Starbound, Ferraris, and Borderlands all came afterward building on what has been done before. Older stuff isn't inherently bad because it isn't new, newer stuff isn't inherently bad or always better because it isn't old. That's all I wanted to say, in more than so many words.