Agreed. New systems to the game tend to just be shallow window dressing. Settlement management is literally fetch quests, or kill X number of sentinels that are

Agreed. New systems to the game tend to just be shallow window dressing. Settlement management is literally fetch quests, or kill X number of sentinels that are attacking. A vast portion of the game revolves around finding things and shooting mining beams at them. Valheim solved this beautifully, they turned boring resource gathering tasks into practically their own minigames - you can use the simple tree/ground physics to cause massive chain reactions that are super satisfying to watch. NMS's planets are enormous and completely devoid of any content. They're just an endlessly repeating pattern of the same outposts, resources, etc. They couldn't even be bothered to add a map feature so you can see where you've been, probably to hide the fact that it's just a bunch of identical tiles. No landmarks, no biomes, no reason to venture past a 5 minute radius from your landing area because everything on the planet can be found everywhere.