Also feeling a little disheartened

How should the development be paid for?

By entitlement gratitude and rainbows ofc.

I've tried running PA on 4 different computers now. Crashing is and was incredibly rare out of the box (proverbially, since digital content... anyway) on all of them. Your experience is by no means representative, and I would assume is due to weird hardware compatibility issues on your end.

And in the rare instances I do something ridiculous enough to make PA crash I can almost always just reboot the game and jump back in where I was.

Never crashed or had problems on both of my computers (one new and one 6 years old) after the updates.
I still think PA needs improvement and more content and for that the company needs to continue

How about making a bug free balanced game before releasing it, getting good reviews and gaining a good sizeable community and then giving free updates or is that not a feasible business model?

What is balanced?

Like what does it mean? I don't understand the question here. Is it sarcastic or rhetorical? Any help?

You can endlessly discuss if a game is "balanced" or not. There is no way to objectively proof it. I'd say base PA is a balanced game all and all.

If you have the funds to get that far. Reality is Uber didn't. And even if you are happy with your release version you can't make free updates for forever. PA had free (with new content) updates for nearly a full year.
Same with more content into the future: Depending on how well Titans sells you'll see more or less free content patches. Once there is no more money the choice always will be: Try to sell addons or stop development.

I think you have to understand uber were in a tough spot before the kickstarter for PA.

Whilst the kickstarter was very successful for crowd funding, it was also a very small sum of money for a game this complex (sup com 1 had a 10+ million budget for comparison) to the level chris Taylor (lead dev from ta and sup com) commented he didn't think uber could do it for the money.

Essentially PA was developed on a shoe string budget, and despite all that it's turned out very well, albeit if it took a bit longer than many would have liked.

I'm not saying everything was perfect, just that given the constraints I think uber did ok.

Said this before somewhere else and I'll say it here. Supreme commander Forged Alliance had a 23 million dollar budget. Now compare that to PA's 2 million. I think Uber did a damn good job especially when taking that into account.

I'm still wondering how they did it.
I had a friend who worked in accounting/controlling of a bigger software company for some years. The basic budget of a good programmer with CS degree was estimated with roughly $150000 p.a. that includes wages as well as social taxes, health care and office space and equipment.
I don't know how these numbers translate to the US, since the company operated mostly in Europe, but if you take a similar number 2 million will get you only around 15 man years. That is nothing, if you have to build an engine, all the art assets and the game logic, including unknown problems, like simultaneous pathfinding for thousands of units.

Well, they got 2.5 million, have afair 15 devs sitting on PA, and went relatively early into EA.

I wouldn't be suprised if the pay isn't that good working in the games industry, and especially developing something via Kickstarter.

The 1Gb patch most likely was Titan, that has been lately removed from the owners of vanilla PA.

You still get the bugfixes and engine optimisations.

Yes, perhaps they finally finished PA vanilla with the last patch. But they didn't let us with much time to enjoy it, didn't they? PA vanilla is not even on sale any longer.

If I'd like to keep playing with the community I'd have to pay a sort of tax (buying into PA:Titans), and no one like taxes, or being forced to pay anything at all.

It should be a choice, but Uber didn't let us much of one.

This is a bit harsh. For sure, if you want to take part in tournaments or you simply always want the newest and shiniest thing, there is no way around those $13. But on the other side, since PA:T is now out there for two weeks, we can do some kind of recap.

All PA:T users can still play PA. If you join a PA game this happens automagically, and it seems that the PA games did in fact profit from the surplus of PA:T users. Additionally, at least as far as I heard, there are at some people out there that don't like the new titans. I can imagine that there will be for at least some time people playing the original game, even if those people now have PA:T.
A look at steamcharts shows that at the two weeks after release of PA:T, the number of players of PA didn't decrease significantly. Most of the time it is somewhere between 40% and 60% of PA:T users. Granted, this is only a small part of the player base of PA and PA:T, but I guess we can take this at least as a trend for whole community. I guess the fade out of PA is happening slower than most of us thought.

Well, I have just noticed that the original PA is unable to purchase on Steam. I have seen many people complaining, mostly Steam users, and I can kinda feel their pain. In one hand, this DLC could be considered as a major update, bringing everything that PA had and putting even more features into it, which is why some people feel ripped-off in some sense. On the other hand, this DLC could be seen as support to the development of the game, for the free updates. One thing I would like to discuss though, is the fact that more and more people that are buying this DLC are giving negative reviews for the amount of bugs, as if it is unfinished. Most of these reviews have been posted on Steam, but a much larger majority have been posted across the internet, leading some to superstition about what has actually happened with the DLC.

So your entire argument is "Uber can pull this scumbag move because other companies are doing it?"
I'll ignore the fact that the Iphone releases consistently add a lot of new features, reliability, and actual upgraded hardware and just focus on the fact that your argument doesn't prove, even a little, that Uber made a good call here. EA also releases buggy, terrible games for a high cost. Does that mean Uber should be mimicking that business plan too? Oh wait... they already have....

Scumbag move? You've got some heavily distorted rhetoric there; it's called Business, not charity

The investment into Titans was some 10 months of time multiplied by some 20 full-time employees; do the maths and you'll see that's millions of dollars of expense, on top of their continuous work on the base game.

No business is going to give you something for nothing