It's not even close to being "full" right now. The developer has taken the same track as Star Citizen's dev.....fully interactive environments. As of now, those interactive environments don't exist in Elite, but according to plans, they certainly will (first-person interaction in ships, planets, and an FPS component).
Compared to the broken, piece-meal, over-budget, bloated scrap pile that is Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous is the king over that peasant game.
Sure, there are some major improvements coming to Elite Dangerous like the Wing update and the planetary interaction update, but even without those, ED is objectively superior to SC in every single measurable argument.
Literally, not figuratively, LITERALLY every single way. ED built their game for about $5 million. That's not even buying a pre-existing game engine like SC is doing, the built their OWN game engine from scratch! On top of that, 2/3 of the initial investment to make Elite Dangerous were from Frontier. That's Braben's own money. Only 1/3 of the money was crowd funded. SC is limping along at a snail's pace at more than $50 million, entirely crowd funded, and the only things they have to show for it already are broken, disconnected modules.
SC and ED even began development around the same period of time and look how poorly SC has progressed. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Star Citizen is the next Duke Nukem Forever.
David Braben is a saint. An actual saint. During the third Elite game's development, the 1995 release of First Encounters, his production house pushed him to release the game NOW NOW NOW and wouldn't let up even though he told them the game wasn't ready. The production house released the game anyway, against Braben's pleading, and the game wasn't very well received. Players were angry that the game was broken but the production house didn't care because they got paid and, in the process, ruining Braben's reputation. Braben took them to court, suing them over it and he won the case. He then took every single penny that he got from that win and dumped it back into fixing every problem that First Encounters had, knowing that he would never see another dime from his efforts. He felt an obligation to existing and future First Encounter players to right how they had been wronged, knowing that he had just spent every last penny to do it.
http://www.nowgamer.com/the-history-of-elite/
http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Gametek
THAT is honorable. THAT is respectable. THAT is the culture of Elite.
Compare that with the snake oil salesman that is Chris Roberts. If you don't already know how much of other people's money that Roberts has wasted over the course of his career making games, I don't even know where to begin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Roberts_(game_developer)
Strike Commander 2 was pushed back 2 years. Wing Commander 3 and 4 were billed as revolutionary this and that but his efforts to make live action videos integrated into the game weren't greatly received and were done pretty terribly.
Then look at all the trouble he went through and caused with the 1992 film Wing Commander which he was director of.
Freelancer was 2 years behind schedule and over budget. The game was nothing like what it was advertised for.
After leaving the games industries, he got people to invest in his movie and TV company Point of No Return Entertainment, of which NOTHING was created, effectively stealing money from investors.
Then he created Ascendent Pictures, again suckering investors into throwing their money away on poor content, if any. Having done nothing of consequence with all the money that his investors gave him, he straight up disappeared to live on their money. Yay thieving!
His business partner is now an international media attorney, which basically means that his business partner is someone who is in place to make sure that what he advertises and sells doesn't get him into legal trouble anymore, like a parent or a watch dog.
Chris Roberts not only has a history of bilking investors (this time the investors are PLAYERS!! YOU!!!) out of time and money, but he has a history of billing his projects far beyond what he actually produces AND releasing them years and years after they were supposed to have been released.
In the end, you have a good game made by a good company that has an honorable and respectable man at its heart and you're comparing it to a game that smells every bit like every other failed project made by a known thief and charlatan.
For Chris Roberts' sake, I really do hope he FINALLY gets it right even ONE TIME with Star Citizen but I and most other people realize that it probably won't. Hell, the only time you really find people defending Star Citizen is because they've invested money into it. They're going to be the next name on the wall of victims of bilked investors and they're arguing vehemently against any objection to Star Citizen because they don't want to acknowledge that they've effectively thrown their money away.
The "Full" realization of both games will leave me wishing I had far more time on my hands. I don't care if it takes a few more years to get there, as long as they do.
Be that as it may, you can actually play a legitimate game from a respectable man in Elite Dangerous right now or you can sit on your hands getting bored after playing a few rounds for a few minutes in one of a couple disconnected modules in Star Citizen and hope and pray that they don't push the release date back again and again. Star Citizen was supposed to have been released this past year, in 2014, right along with ED. It's been pushed back so many times that I don't have any faith at all that it will be released in 2016. I'd be willing to bet money that it'll be pushed back repeatedly until it's the next 10-year development flop that was Duke Nukem Forever.