I wonder when will they. At some point they'll have to...
Sure, at some point we will have to. However, StarMade (and I've said this many times) is not ready for the average consumer. The state the game is in currently is unstable, unbalanced and incomplete, we know this, the average StarMade player knows this, but the average consumer does not. We read all our steam reviews; we read all the discussions that take place on the steam forum, we read every support ticket, and bug report sent. We know what the average consumer thinks, we know what the average StarMade player thinks, and we know what long time players think. We take in criticism and document it from all locations; we watch new players play our game on Twitch, YouTube and similar sites, we document where they have issues, and we document what they thought.
We only ever advertise/promote StarMade when we need more funds for development, since releasing on the Steam EA program, we've been able to maintain development without further exposing StarMade to the public. We will likely begin a second round of advertisements in the near future, as purchases have slowly declined at a steady rate since first release at Steam EA, which is to be expected. We saved quite a significant portion of the first few months of Steam EA, which we've used to keep development going. This is not "game is dying", this is a calculated exposure rate and expected decline. It's not surprising to us that the number of active servers will decrease as well, it doesn't make sense to host a server when player activity is low. (I do want to say that from January to June, we've always seen a large decline in purchases/player count, and then a sharp increase in the second half of the year. This is the same with other games and media.)
It's a lot harder to get back old players than it is to get new ones, it would be detrimental to StarMade development to launch a massive advertising campaign. We now have a rough idea of what it's going to take to get to beta and have a rough internal timeline of how we're going to achieve that. Further exposure is slated, but it won't be on a large scale. You will be seeing advertising pushes here and there leading up to beta; beta launch will likely see a significant advertising campaign and the final advertising campaign will be at release.
There are three main reasons StarMade is in open alpha, funding, testing and developing a community and resources for beta and release launches.
by first focusing on increasing the total population of starmade (something that any business would surely benefit from, after all, schine is a company)
See above.
You cannot keep replacing parts of your game that make it unique just because a few players feel that it is old, uncomplicated, and undesirable.
The reason we replace parts of our game is because we want to replace them. We evaluate the "feature"; we see whether it helps us achieve our goal. We see whether it can be improved. We read steam reviews, SMD posts, reddit, and we observe new players. Finally, we have our systems evaluated by other professional game designers. From all these different sources, we come to a conclusion. If we find a system is not helping us achieve our goal, we are willing to replace it. We don't replace big systems lightly, heavy consideration and lots of planning go into it.