You're not being very fair, Nippelspanner: you'll acknowledge Dangerous Waters' automatic crewmen, but Cold Waters allegedly depicts "robot-subs" just because the voiceovers haven't been implemented yet? The implementation of crewmen is functionally the same in both cases.
As for direct control, it's been a point of contention in the community but the devs are working on an alternative navigation module which will allow players to give more general, "captain-like" commands. That said, a sub commander is well capable of giving precise rudder/planes/ballast commands, and KFG originally went for that because they felt it was more immersive. I for one prefer traditional subsim controls, but have come to appreciate the value of direct ones as well: it's particularly important when evading torpedoes, for instance. We'll have both options soon enough, and for that I'm immensely grateful.
At any rate, what constitutes an "unfinished" game? Is it reasonable to call Cold Waters unfinished just because it's lacking a couple of secondary features? Theoretically, perhaps, but in this age of extensive post-release development, all games which receive content updates (and DLC) after launch could be considered unfinished even if they were released in a complete-enough state.
So what'd be a finished game, then? One which has stopped receiving updates beyond bugfixes and balancing? Is that necessarily a positive trait? And is it a negative thing to have this very playable, enjoyable subsim for which its creators intend to produce more stuff for a while yet?
Truth is KFG could call CW finished today, because it's an arbitrary decision and save for bug-freedom, the game has all the features the devs intended it to have to be reasonably called complete. But ultimately we all benefit the longer Cold Waters remains "unfinished" and with upcoming content in the pipeline.
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