Sci-fi would be boring if there were no works that relied on FTL, but having at least one story where it doesn't exist feels really nice. Having to commit to a course because of the restrictions of Hohmann transfer orbits, so that after day 1 you can't change your trajectory because you'd be fighting basically all of Nema's gravity to do it, is frustrating in a cool way, and is the kind of restrictions I like in a game. (I nearly lost a station and a massive cargo hauler because of it! My fault for not deploying in a way to be where they wanted to be before they were, I guess! *shakes fist at Sun Tzu*)
It's nice. I think about that, sometimes, about how we show only a tiny part of any planet in our fiction, as if a planet were only a single town or city rather than an area so vast you couldn't learn every nook and cranny of it in a lifetime; and space is so vast, especially around a gas giant. Granted in orbital space you only have a few kinds of places that would be highly populated; LaGrange points for the three-body stability issues, geostationary orbits if there's a reason (such as in The Spire or [spoiler]). But that's an incredibly large amount of space, and there are other reasons to occupy other parts of it too. Earth orbit is big enough to lose yourself in. Nema's would be massive. The emptiness one feels in Helium Rain reflects that nicely, in a way most sci-fi fails to.