I’m not sure about Elite, but I think I was saying that more to your point than against it.
When I first got the game I had about 50-60 hours into it before I started getting bored. I spent most of that time farming eggs to sell and hanging out in space ports waiting for cool ships to arrive. I’ve come back a few times after updates but it always felt monotonous. All that’s really left is it’s a cool VR tech demo, as long as you only want to fly ships (which is pretty cool, but gets old fast).