I went to the pre-order FAQ and looked it up to refresh my memory. It's
here, for reference.
Q. What if you don't get enough preorders, will the game be unfinished?
A. No, the Starbound is going to make it out in 2013 no matter what.
That probably should be beta, but it isn't, and is very easy to misread/misremember. They also promised to add new tracks to the soundtrack over time, and have not. And to update the roadmap, which schedule slipped and then got more-or-less abandoned in favor of the daily updates (which I much prefer, don't get me wrong, but shifting that way is a bit off-putting, objectively).
There's also a subtle undertone of dis-ingenuousness in their infodumps, where over the course of several months we get "feature X is complete!" and then "feature X is finally in-game" and then "feature X is finally being integrated with other gameplay elements!" and finally "we're debugging/reworking feature X!" I'd only actually call the last step "complete."
I've been trying to remain on the optimistic side of neutral, but things like that make me raise an eyebrow nonetheless.
All that said...
I know it's a large-ish team of developers who live on different continents and have accomplished everything via teleconferencing, which isn't easy. What they've done already is laudable, and the ones who update regularly seem to be good, likeable folks who really enjoy what they do and are enthusiastic about it. I still feel I've gotten my pre-order money's worth from the soundtrack alone, and believe I'll be spending many, many hours on this down the road. I'm just a bit un-easy about some of their practices so far, which will perhaps be forgotten post-release. Whenever that is.