I think some people don't understand what a procgen survival-craft game is. They're not wrong about it being an open sandbox, that's kinda the point. People talking about taking too long getting to space might not know about the limited time expeditions you can just start in for a different take, or turning the game to creative mode so they don't need to spend time resource farming to get their ship working so they can go fly around if that's all they want from the game.

The story and those quests will be rooted in building something. The space exploration will be rooted in finding a cool place loosely intended for your next base. The space battles and encounters will be part of the same core procgen survival craft cycle.

I won't deny there's probably only 20-40 hours of "real content" in the game. Most of what is there is shallower, or easilly missable, without the expedition(limited-time event) that launched it. A lot of things do seem like "grind X yourself, order team to do Y every few hours, fly to Z and talk to someone" which will get repetitive if/when you keep getting the same ones.