I am greatly looking forward to diving back in next week, and am treating it basically as a free sequel.
NMS has base building and much better world exploration.
Both games are a grind until you come across a strategy that gives you a bunch of currency and then it's just a sandbox because you can buy everything (NMS less so because you sometimes have to find the thing to buy).
Except it doesn't work that way, the procedural generation engine in the game obviously has too few assets too many constraints to really come up with original planets and biomes, after a few couple of planets everything looks the same and plays the same. You don't have anything worthwhile to do and nothing to look forward to. You don't feel like you're progressing, you don't feel like you can meaningfully interact with the universe.
Since then they've added base building and now multiplayer though, so that probably helps with these issues but I firmly believe that there's something fundamentally broken about NMS, it looks like it's a tech demo before somebody decided to actually implement a game with it.
It still felt a tad bit unfinished in some respects (a flashier 'ending' with multiple possible outcomes would be ideal), but I was able to get a lot of great hours out of it-- enough so that I'm definitely planning to replay from the beginning after this Next patch.