The reason Star Citizen will take forever to make

[Pemalite]

SvennoJ said:
They'll have to start over soon to rebuild the engine for ray tracing, 8K and dynamic HDR.
It's quickly becoming a last gen experience in the making.

You don't need to rebuild an engine for any of that.
Plus the games engine supports voxel based global illumination, which is pretty good... If DXR/RTX Ray tracing is to be implemented it will likely be used to replace screen space reflections or enhance shadowing.

8K support already exists, people have been downsampling the game from 8k for ages.

HDR support is also in.

Chazore said:

But yeah, the game is a technical marvel, but I don't think we need any stupid focus on "8k", because an insane chunk of the worlds pop doesn't even own 8k tv's, let alone having enough 8k content to justify the insane price tags either. We don't even have games with 4k res textures (literally on everything, sod just the char/gun models).

Er... There were 7th gen games with 4k textures even when they were only rendering the game at 720P.
Texture resolution and output display resolution are separate.