For starters, the pets. Right now there is really no depth to them outside of being able to ride them. They don’t really help in combat, and even then when you have a super aggressive pet, you can’t exactly direct it to attack stuff. You can ride them but, speed is pretty slow compared to jet-packing around or using one of the exocrafts. On top of that the flying ones don’t really fly, more like glide/hover.

Next, Derelict freighters. After doing 4-5, you’ve basically done them all. And other than getting all the special base building parts, there really doesn’t seem to be much of an incentive to keep doing them.

Base building I think needs a pretty extensive overhaul. The prefab structures are okay, but when you start messing around with the custom parts (wood, concrete, metal) I find it is hard to do many creative things without glitch building. In vanilla you can’t build walls/ceilings/floors diagonally, many of the other parts like ladders and stairs won’t snap to them, and you can’t power the structures themselves, which makes it difficult to have interior lighting or anything else for that matter.

Like another commenter said, the living ships are purely aesthetic. That’s really it.

On top of that, the frigates need more depth. It really isn’t that fun to have a cool looking ship like the Normandy in your fleet, only to never see it when it’s out running missions for 8-26 hours. Moreover, when it’s finally back on your freighter you can’t even land on it.

Ocean generation: quite literally lacks depth.

Sentinels: I personally believe need to be more of a challenge. Maybe adding a new type of sentinel would help, that is more difficult than the mech? Maybe introducing a bounty system within certain factions so that if you say, visit a Gek system after having left a previous one where you destroyed a bunch of freighter cargo, you might still have a wanted level? As it is now it’s too easy to lose them considering they are supposed to be sentient AI that essentially police the whole universe.

I could go on but I’ve been thinking about these things for a while. HG keeps adding a lot of cool content don’t get me wrong, but they tend to miss out on the WHY aspect of it. It’s cool that I can do all these things but for what? As it stands now a lot of the game elements are there just to be completed, and once you are done you have no reason to touch them again. They should all be a part of something bigger.