I know that there were people working on it prior to 2016.
What’s being said is that, its “pre-production”, started in 2016, and that’s information that was made “available”, by the company itself. But apparently that doesn’t really fit your narrative, so… look, my point is, if you want to compare SC to CP in terms of development time, and use 2012 as CP development start because that’s when they had people already working on it, it’s fine, as long as you apply the same principle to SC, and according to SC Kickstarter page:
Meaning, Star Citizen development started at least somewhere between 2010-2011 ^^;What you've seen was put together by a very small team over the past year.