I don't think the RoF guys were lazy. I think they were forced to release it way too prematurely due to financial reasons, plus one of their investors decided on using the constant online requirement. All that gave it a slow start and it's been playing catch up for a while.
That being said, i've tried the demo on various times during its life and i still think it has some way to go before it's something i can consider what i call a complete game in an "out of the box, install and play" sense.
If they had a version with enough flyables, a different DRM and a proper offline campaign (that uses the correct AI opposition, not spawning sopwith camels against my eindecker) i would reconsider.
Then again, i was recently looking it up again and i see people still complain about the render distance and the need to use zoom view to see the dots as close as 2km from their aircraft, so i don't know if such annoyances can be ironed out or it's a case of something that's buried too deep in the game's engine to change.
I think that's the problem with a pay-per-plane business model, even if they are cheap: developers are forced to focus on creating a constant stream of new flyable aircraft to sustain their revenue, almost to the expense of everything else in the sim, plus these flyables are not really that pricey from a developer's point of view but they are from a user's point of view if you want to have more than 4-5 of them.
On the other hand if they did it a la IL2 (content upgrades with major expansions only), they'd have more time to work on other stuff in-between releases of expansions: bug fixing, game engine upgrades, extra AI units to help enrich missions and campaigns, etc. Plus, they would be able to sell it for $50 instead of $5 and more people would buy it. Even if an expansion includes 5 planes i'm not interested in among a total of 10, i still consider it a better value than buying 5 planes individually, because expansions usually include extra maps or other goodies (some AI ground units, added mission builder capabilities or just a new mission type or multiplayer mode as an extra selling point). So, a full-on expansion is also a way for a developer to sell extra flyables to me that i wouldn't otherwise buy individually.
What i'm really interested to see is how long it takes before a 3d party group makes a WW1 sim out of Oleg's new engine and how it would compare to RoF.