I don't think it's specific to Chris Roberts at all, there's this very common sense among... well, us... that the big name at the head of a given franchise is someone who cares about what we're starting to lump together as 'lore'... and the reality is that that's rarely the case. We like to make little Gods out the name at the top of the credits when the reality is that they aren't looking at their work the way we are at all. Take somebody like George Lucas who is incredibly passionate about the minutiae of filmmaking... but who never cared at all about making some cohesive Star Wars world. (Or Gene Roddenberry, a man whose actual genius was what producers really do... arranging financing!)
In the case of Chris Roberts, he's always been motivated by projects that let him move the needle. Wing Commander, Strike Commander, Wing Commander III were all projects that gave him an excuse to do something new and important, whether it was building new technology or coming up with a new way to tell a story. But he's not sitting down and saying 'I want to tell the story of the 26th century space war'... he's hiring someone he thinks will do a good job of that. Most of the 'lore' of Wing Commander is a gloss, written to go with where the technology is being pushed.
He famously didn't want to do Wing Commander IV because it wasn't going to let him do any of that... like Wing Commander 2, the idea was to have a sequel using the old tech out within a year. The bargain he struck with EA was that they'd let him do something new and important--shoot the thing like an actual Hollywood film. The goal there wasn't to tell a particular Wing Commander story so much as it was to set up the whole industry to take a seat next to the folks making motion pictures (which happened to some degree but not as he hoped at the time!).
(If you're interested, the game he wanted to make in 1995 was an RPG called Silverheart that he hoped would merge video and gameplay in totally new ways. EA never let him do it!)
I avoid most Star Citizen news these days and even I saw that! But even though these two comments weren't intended to be related, I think they really are. Because for all the complaining fans do about their IP work... it's still making much, much more money than the arguably better stuff you mentioned. The fragmentation we experience as nerds on the internet does not matter at all to the people behind it. The worst of the recent Star Warses made four times Blade Runner 2049... and that's before endless ancilliary profits! So while we cringe and go "ugh, $48,000 for a video game? that's so stupid" the people on the other end of things are perfectly happy to have that headline making the rounds... because in the end it just convinces a few more people to spend $48,000!
