Hi! I'm a whale (a supporter of Star Citizen who dropped more than $1k on it) to answer your questions as well.

Is this game any good?

..."game" is a bit of a strong word. Star Citizen is presently an interactive research and development tech demo with some game-like elements haphazardly stapled onto it like Frankenstein's monster.

But surprisingly, the answer to "is it any good" is, in my opinion, kinda maybe.

This interactive tech demo pretending to be a game has done, and does, some amount of good:

• it attempts, and sometimes "succeeds" (loosely) to do stuff the rest of the industry won't even look at.
• it's fertile ground for developing the skills of a great many talented creative people who MAY go on to do amazing things elsewhere
• the unique and original techniques, approaches, solutions, and technologies they develop will also go on to revolutionize other projects, or even other industries
• on a personal basis, i do have fun playing it more often than not. i like to fly around, i like mining, i like freight hauling, i like salvaging, and i'm looking forward to the repair and maintenance gameplay they recently demonstrated, which may be added """"SOMEDAY™""" within the decade.

If you go into star citizen expecting it to be a game that performs and responds to your actions consistently, and retains your progress and allows you to keep what you earned (so far), you will be disappointed.

But if you go into it expecting
"Model trains, except
it's space ships,
and I can fly them around,
and they have guns i can shoot,
and there's stuff to shoot at,
and I can get up and walk around inside them,
and I can get out and spacewalk around them,
and I can land them on planets and at space stations,
where there are sometimes a few things I can get out and do,
and i can earn credits doing the stuff that i can spend on more ships (until the next server wipe)"
then you might actually enjoy yourself.

If you are already a backer and have a citizen account that lets you log in and recall a ship into a hangar, it's worth trying.

If HAVEN'T already bought in, though, I would indeed advise waiting before you do so, to let the current growing pains settle regarding what they're working on right now...

Server meshing (enabling multiple servers to distribute the load of a single continuous universal instance such that a protracted fleet battle happening over another planet will not cause performance to tank across the entire universe) is a quite disruptive technology that is forcing the devs to re-adapt a lot of extant systems and, as you might know in software development, changing one thing over here might cause several other glitches to emerge all over the place.

ONCE server meshing is stabilized, we MIGHT see certain persistent pain in the ass issues resolve that would normally require an instance of the universe to be rebooted - since, allegedly, additional servers can be spun up and spun down to dynamically unload and reload malfunctioning assets in the universe without having to take the whole thing offline.

that's the big major milestone they're gunning for right now, and also the tightest bottleneck.

it is a fun time and interesting experience though, and when i crave what star citizen offers, nothing else does the job.