Yeah, I played a decent amount and quit when I realized the first boss isn’t the lead-in to the story. I’ll come back when there’s more to it (especially since the Game Pass version is out of date).

Yes, but you’ll be able to experience the emptiness in new and more boring ways!

cutscenes of a ship taking off rather than an interactive first person view

Docking is more egregious. It’s not even hiding a loading screen, it’s just wasting our time so things like the CF/SysDef back and forth take longer.

and the same dull and lifeless NPC “AI” (I use that term very generously given recent advances) as we saw in older Bethesda titles.

It’s worse IMO, NPCs don’t seem to have schedules anymore. Which is kind of okay, my least favorite thing in Skyrim was shops being closed because there’s no “fast travel and arrive in the morning” option, but they feel a lot less alive when they stand in one place forever.

by locking many parts behind two different skills, Piloting and Starship Design

And upgrades locked behind levels, plus not having all parts at all shipyards (or even all parts of one brand at their main location).

where 90% of them are procedurally generated with nearly identical enemies

It’s worse than that. The POIs are recycled almost exactly. They’re made in a way where they could have been procedural, but instead we get the same dozen-ish of them repeated with the same things in the same place.

I really regret thinking the extra time to polish would result in a game where we don’t need modders to make things decent. The mod tools aren’t even out and people have rebalanced multiple systems to be way better than Bethesda came up with.

Thr devs certainly think there’s replayablity since they try to force it on you.

The outpost mechanic is completely and utterly pointless

I’d say it’s worse than pointless. The only reason I can see to use it (outside of XP farming) is to make the grind for research/crafting easier, but it even fails at that since you can buy/loot any resources you need for less than it takes to set up the outposts. It can’t even make one of the other half-baked systems less of a pain to deal with.