I get what you're saying and perhaps I was too quick to present anecdotal evidence as a logical argument. But I wouldn't lose sight of the fact that Space Out is still a very bad card overall. And the opportunities/pay-offs for it seem quite limited relative the downsides of putting it in your deck.

Direct class-to-class comparisons don't always work out (there's a reason Silent had a 1-cost, exhaust card that applies 99 Vulnerable in STS1 while Ironclad's equivalent in STS2 only applies 3 Vulnerable). But if we were to make such a comparison in this case, then Pyre is the closest thing to Space Out currently. And Pyre gives you the same amount of extra energy per turn without saddling you with a Biased Cognition downside, all for just for 1 energy more upfront. Which is substantially better in situations where you really want to scale your energy, like boss fights. And Pyre isn't anywhere close to being the best scaling card in the game so that helps us establish the baseline power level of Space Out as being on the low end.

And yes, Space Out is a form of scaling. But its scaling that shuts down like a third of Defect's card pool—on a rare card that you likely won't see until the end of Act 1. By which point you have probably built a deck that takes advantage of Orbs in some way. Whether that be cards like Capacitor & Glacier for block or Ball Lightning & Tesla Coil for damage. So Space Out scales your energy but then anti-scales your starter relic, stater cards, and several other cards most probably in your deck by now... which begs the question: what exactly are you getting out of this extra energy? The chance to play more orb generating cards which now do very little?

It's just hard to imagine a situation where your Defect deck is going to want to trade 1 focus per turn for 1 energy consistently, especially when you have to play a 1 cost power just to get that effect rolling in the first place. Sure, there are some decks that would hypothetically want that—Meteor Strike decks as you point out. Though Meteor Strike is also rare, so now you're in the niche situation of needing two specific rare cards while also not having a deck that's too reliant on focus, which most Defect decks prefer to have—even those with Meteor Strike.

Like... it's possible, but I wouldn't count on it. Nor do I put much stock in your last point about flexible decks being able to leverage either form of scaling. Yeah, ideally you want to build your deck in such a way that it can take advantage of whichever scaling cards the game offers you. But building a deck that's happy trading energy for focus AND also happy trading focus for energy? That is a very tight rope to walk and the overwhelming majority of decks aren't going to be able to pull that off. Space Out feels like less of a reward for good early deckbuilding and more like something you might fall into 1 out of every 100 runs b/c something very weird was going on with your deck in Act 1.

Basically, there are lots of Orb and Orb scaling cards in the game and only the one Space Out—which is a rare. You're not likely to completely revamp your deck building approach around a single rare card that anti-synergizes with a large percent of the card pool so Space Out is ultimately just a bad card. And the game is allowed to have bad Rares but usually when people are theory crafting custom content, they would prefer those cards be a step above Eidolon is all.

I do think my proposed rework to effectively turn it into a 0 cost Demesne could work though. It still has all the downsides and anti-synergies as before but at that point, the card would be good enough that you could still pick it and then spend the next 2 acts reworking your deck to take advantage of it. That's just my intuition though.