Why is a funding boost so essential? They have had five years now, collected 125$ Mio. and now, suddenly, if they don't reach impeccable quality, after previously consistently staying far below industry standards in terms of polish of their playable output, that is a no go? To the point that they mislead backers into buying Citizencon tickets from them, expecting a Squadron 42 showing? With a year since the last showing to prepare something? Anything? As mentioned by RubberJohnny, not even a trailer that they ought to have had months in advance?
What gives?
Nope. I'm not buying the "we were not 100% satisfied" excuse. Not in the context of a five year dev cycle, 125$ Mio. of funding and the buffoon Chris Roberts who is full enough of shit to pull such stunts as the Star Marine fiasco. With that amount of time into the project and that amount of money, they ought to have been able to deliver something. They should not to depend on further backing to do so, because we've long passed the threshold of them asking obscene amounts of money for fantasy ships and they ought to have had enough time for a trailer at the very, very least. And they still manage to disappoint.
I'm left with the conclusion that they have nothing to show for themselves. Not even remotely, because we would've gotten a trailer otherwise by now. What they have is either completely unfinished or we would have seen something - most likely a trailer - or it is completely fucked up. Potentially both.
It seems you're being completely absurd in an attempt to find any reason to try to make the game look bad.
Their approach to SQ42 has not changed. Before now there has one a
single proper showing of the game beyond the very, very brief behind the scenes footage we've had. The only thing we've seen of SQ42 is the extremely buggy and unfinished gameplay from last years CitizenCon along with the CGI trailer. It has not been a case of them showing a large amount of clearly unfinished content for it and then suddenly deciding they have nothing to show. They showed something last year to give players
some indication of what was going on with it despite it being pretty broken at the time, and now they want to do it right the first time they show off an actual full mission by having it in an entirely finished state.
As Chris said during the Stream, their approach to SQ42 is different from Star Citizen, and what they've shown over the past few years for it has been consistent with that idea. There was a leak of content a while back so we know there was a vast amount of content for SQ42 that hadn't been shown to us, for reasons of spoilers; SQ42 is an experience that they want to have the biggest impact it can on players the first time. That's not the same case with Star Citizen where everyone's experience is entirely unique and other players won't get the same thing as they will, showing unfinished stuff is different with that as it doesn't matter so much.
A comment saying "we're going to show a little of SQ42" in an interview for a gaming site is not "misleading" anyone into buying tickets for CitizenCon. No one is going to buy an expensive ticket and go all that way solely just so they can see SQ42 gameplay.
Especially when the tickets were put on sale in March and sold out within hours and the ones put on sale later on also sold out fast. So no one bought tickets just to see SQ42
because they couldn't as tickets weren't even really available to buy when that comment was said.
You have no reason to think the funding boost is "essential". If it was "essential" and they desperately needed more money then then deciding not to show SQ42 in any form completely goes against that. They would have shown something of SQ42 (a trailer, like you suggest) no matter the state if it was "essential".
What exactly are you expecting to happen? They'll just suddenly throw together an entire mission at fully polished quality out of nowhere in the next few weeks or months just to try to scrape together a bit more money that you claim they desperately need in an attempt to keep up up the supposed charade until it all fails? Or they won't show anything at all in which case they don't get the "essential" funding boost? Neither of those are plausible at all.
They could have made a trailer, sure, but that's not what they wanted to do. They wanted to do an actual gameplay demo (which is what they've done with everything except the ship commericials) and they couldn't get it sorted out to the quality they wanted in time. It's far easier to accept and far more likely that rather than the reason you suggest, the reason they gave for not showing it is the actual reason for not showing it; they wanted to give a preview of what the game would be like when entirely finished, they thought they could get it finished in time, but they couldn't so would rather wait a few weeks to show it properly.
The lack of a gameplay demo or trailer at CitizenCon does not indicate that the entire thing is going wrong. If we still don't have that gameplay within the next few weeks or months, then yes, that would be concerning, but unless you think Chris has outright lied several times then it'll be shown soon.