Actually, you get told 200 years by Codsworth and and you're reaction is "200 years?!" sand he response with with something along the lines of "actually a little over 200 something"
No, you're confusing a couple of things here.
You got frozen 200 years ago. That's when the
war was. You woke up the first time was much more recent - about 60 years ago - and the game doesn't let you ask this of anyone, or do anything to work it out, and even though it seems obvious from various context cues that it's at least "decades", the character is forced to be a dumbass and to assume it was merely days or weeks ago. It's not very well written because subtlety is not a strong point for BGS writers (any of them), so NPCs keep dropping hints, and the writers clearly think they're really clever, but you just don't have the dialogue options (even if you have stuff like high science and INT) to work it out.
Re: shipbuilding, I'm not sure how you'd cite that, but the reality is most people are flying generic ships with small modifications. This is very easy to see if you watch Let's Plays or Twitch or YouTube. People think it's cool when someone builds a ship that looks like a giant dick or famous spaceship or whatever, but almost all of that is done by the same few people, if you look at the reddit or the like.
Yeah, the most forced part of that was making the one guy who could reasonably be a reference point for the passage of time also just happen to be the one guy who is functionally immortal.
Yeah they literally had to do that as a red herring, or the whole thing would have immediately broken down.
Everything wanes in popularity. That is inevitable, and therefore predictable. The only uncertainty is when the decile will happen. The only sensible move is to always have a backup plan.
Can you explain to me what the backup plan actually looks like, then?
It's much easier to
reasonably say "D&D-style fantasy will probably still be popular in 10-20 years", than to figure out what genre/subgenre of SF or particularly space SF is going to be and remain popular in 10 years even.
The best plan I can see, if you assume fantasy will take a dive at some point, would be to make a space TT RPG focusing absolutely on it being fun to play, and fun to think about the universe of, and to carefully
avoid the massive temptation of cross-marketing with D&D, as perverse as that sounds, so that if D&D "goes down" for some reason, it doesn't take this game with it. You'd want a whole different set of mechanics and gameplay, for example. Is that the plan you see?
The trouble I see is again, as I said, I don't think WotC has people who have the mindset to pull that off, and I think that if they tried doing an entirely new ruleset, they'd get pulled into an ultra-monetized design (i.e. using "funky dice", a card-based system, or the like), and ultra-monetized designs don't have any long-term legs, especially as it's impossible for them survive lean periods.
But again, what are YOU proposing, that's what I want to hear!