Infuriating multiplayer experience

My brother and I both got heavily into this game when it was first released, then drifted away after a bit.

I've been playing a lot recently, and managed to drag him back in tonight. However, it's just completely broken for multiplayer.

We tried a bit of multicrew – cool, let's land on a planet and get some materials so I can engineer my ship a bit. Oh. Apparently we can't drive SRVs round a planet in multicrew. Why?

OK, let's go kill some NPCs. He flew my fighter round, that was good fun, but the fighter is a bit weak. He went off to get his own ship. Left multicrew, oh, right, we can't wing up because he's still in multicrew, in spite of it saying on my screen "XXX has left crew".

*sigh* Restart game.

Right! Let's go kill stuff. Grabbed a wing mission – this looks hard as nails, going to need both of us!

Wingman navlock on, wing beacon on, I FSD into the mission instance. Three targets, I lock up and engage the primary mission target. Oh wow, these guys are tough, they're ripping my Anaconda apart! My bro pipes up "so, where are you? I see three dudes, are we shooting them?"

Seems he dropped into a completely separate instance.

I'd grin and bear this as "lol yeah PC gaming right" but this happens every time I try to play with other people in Elite – so effectively this is just a single player game for me – just in Open the NPCs are a bit more interesting 🙂

I really love this game, but it is utterly infuriating that the multiplayer experience is SO broken.

Anyone else have similar experiences? Is it just me?