This all ties into why small studios and indie teams don't tend to work well.
There's nothing wrong with a small team, the problem is that it actually has to be a
team, with a leader, defined goals, a shared vision, etc, vs the Frontier which had neither of those, plus a public pitch that didn't align with the actual content.
And honestly, Frontier could have still made it even with that. Fusion City Rising and its offshoot/companion mods have most of the same issues as Frontier (maybe worse. At the very least Frontier had the taste to not make an extremely dated and unfunny Olsen Twins "joke"), and FCR didn't get anywhere near the flak that Frontier did, despite having the same tonally inconsistent, immature, and lore breaking story. Frontier isn't
that different, and it actually brings some impressive technical design to the game.
I think the real issue was that Frontier spent so long being advertised as "this massive super mod 7 years in the making, the biggest NV mod ever" that people built up expectations for it that it utterly failed to deliver one, whereas something like FCR was crapped out in the course of a year or so and didn't have to deal with that level of expectation.