Star Citizen is going to be a case study in open development for years to come, regardless of the outcome of the project itself. To my knowledge (which may be woefully misinformed), there hasn't really been a game of this scale where almost every facet of the development process has been laid bare for the public to see.

What I'll be curious to see when all things are said and done is a timeline of the project, every updated feature, expanded scope, or delayed module, and have actual industry developers weigh in on the outcome. Because again (to my potentially woefully misinformed viewpoint), most of the people talking about this game are not game developers. It's a conversation that's been predominantly held by the people playing the game, and that's hard to quantify. How many people went into the Alpha with the impression that they'd be testing and providing feedback? How many went into Arena Commander hoping to get into the game early and had no intention of giving feedback? How many people pledged once and never checked updates? How many people followed the game on a week-by-week basis. And of all these groups, who was most and least satisfied by the end result?

Rather than the thoughts of individuals, I'd love to see a solid data analysis of this entire project once the game finally hits version 1.0. The amount of information and citable instances of consumer satisfaction and frustration could be immensely useful both to developers and projects of this scale, as well as to the public that (for the most part) has little to no understanding of what game development is actually like.