Between the two of you, you’ve complained they’re selling both too many and too few paid ships.
The claim they make is that they sell better ships because they want there to be late-game ships in the universe on launch day, and that they want the number limited so the game is properly balanced. If they weren’t trying to grab cash at least a little bit, they could have raffled them off or given them for free to the people with the most playtime in alpha, so there wasn’t a need to involve money, but their claim isn’t wildly inconsistent with their actions.
I think part of the reason there’s no set release date is that without shareholders breathing down their necks to release early to recoup their investment, they don’t see any advantage to releasing sooner rather than later. Maybe that means they’ll polish the game to a degree we’ve never seen before, but that could either mean a good game with no bugs on launch day, or a game that no one ever gets to play because some perfectionists working on it will never be satisfied.