I recently wondered why I enjoy this game so much. After some thinking, I realized that it has three things I really enjoy:

- exploration

- character advancement (mostly getting better gear, spaceships etc)

- base building

All combined in a 3D game. Its odd in many ways, of course. Quite buggy too, especially with quests. And for certain you could improve all three aspects of it, easily, like:

- Exploration:
* Make galaxies of different sizes and forms
* Allow the player to choose to which (nearby) galaxy to jump to; additionally you can jump only small distances in a small galaxy but you can jump very far in the largest galaxies
* Have realistic sized planets (the current ones are only about as big as Ceres, our largest asteroid)
* Have gas planets (cant land but can have many moons)
* Have actual asteroid belts
* Have wandering planets outside of star systems

Though character advancement is pretty close to perfect, EXCEPT for the fact that to improve your character itself, you have to sacrifice inventory space. Which means if you want to get a really good character you end up with like 12 slots of inventory space left.

Might be different with the most recent patch btw its been a while since I've played.

.. oh wow, you aren't kidding, inventories are massively different and better for it too.
If you continue an old save you will have a bit of a shock coming :)
Most of your upgrades will be packaged, so you can re-install better for the new layouts (yeah and packaging has become a thing, so you can transfer upgrades say from one multitool to another).

https://i.imgur.com/nDvCD7b.png

https://i.imgur.com/PW8YN52.png

https://i.imgur.com/prBlV69.png

In the first screenshot, you can see there are now scroll bars for Tech and Cargo
But you can click the expand icons for each inventory.
Its the same for all inventories now, except Multitool which just has Tech.
You also get randomly placed Superslots (S Class Starships can have up to 4 of these) which boost whatever you place in them, along with adjacency bonuses being upped a little since we lost the ability to have 6 tech upgrades .. have a look at the stats on my multitool

https://i.imgur.com/wJnMknZ.png

Haven't finished upgrading it yet, but the potential Damage is now mental.

Have a look at the Waypoint update https://www.nomanssky.com/waypoint-update/
There have been 4 more updates after the waypoint update, and you may have missed a few updates before it where they overhauled Freighter Base building.
https://www.nomanssky.com/release-log/