Oh, they're projecting plenty, although you are right, his promises make it even worse.
The end result is the same.
The thing with Star Citizen and its endless delays is that anyone could have seen it coming after taking a look at Roberts' track record. WC1 would never have been released if it weren't for guys like Warren Spector keeping the project on track and Steve Beeman actually writing the code; Chris Roberts' name is on WC2 but he had almost nothing to do with it because he was busy trying to make Strike Commander (so Steve Beeman ran WC2, and eventually Erin Roberts had to help out with finishing Strike Commander because it had gone completely off the rails and wound up being released like three years late) and with WC3/4 it was patently obvious that he was more interested in making movies than games. Privateer 1 was completely driven by Erin Roberts with little to no involvement from Chris, and Freelancer suffered from such massive scope creep that Digital Anvil ran out of money and had to sell out to Microsoft to keep the doors open.
I wish this forum had a "like" feature because I didn't know any of that! Sounds like Roberts is fine as a creative lead but you should never let him control the scope or the money. Which surely bodes well for SC, where he controls all of that!
Yep. That's the whole reason EA wouldn't give him the Wing Commander license (Star Citizen began as an unlicensed Wing Commander reboot) -- they insisted on assigning a producer to the project to ensure their IP wasn't being mismanaged and Roberts was all "fuck that, no publishers, no masters."