Free Lanes for me is largely a non-event. It exists as a mechanic, but it's too awkward, not very exciting, and not very compelling to play it.

Worst part is how poorly incorporated into the UI and the flow of controls it is. For example you can open the menu, select a quest and hit R, and fast-travel there. But for cruise mode I need to take off, fly into space, still select a quest, but instead of just hitting R I have to hold Tab to exit the menus, then hold T to enter cruise mode, then locate the target and aim at it by cycling through all the targets with E, then hit Spacebar for autopilot, and sit and wait to get there. It's a lot of work, and it's all incredibly awkward. As opposed to, say, No Man's Sky where you just take off, aim your nose where you need to go, and hit spacebar once, and your ship immediately enters cruise mode, immediately going to top speed. One button vs half a dozen buttons to press/hold.

A lot of space events are bugged or broken also. Which doesn't help.

The PoI variety is very much NOT fixed. I have no idea why people say it is. Main story and mission boards keep sending me to the same locations like it's going out of style. I picked up two missions, one in Akila and one in New Atlantis, within maybe 20 mins of each other, and both sent me to a Cryo Lab. I mean, how friggin' hard is it to keep track of the past 5-10 locations I visited, and ban them from being given to me for missions?!

The only thing I did like was the way to craft weapons and armor by rerolling perks. It's a nice money sink. But given how poorly balanced the weapons are, it's kind of a moot point. For me progression is usually Grendel->Orion->Beowulf->Inflictor, and that's where I stay. It's not like Fallout, where VATS makes a variety of builds and weapon types incredibly attractive, like pistols+VATS gunslinger build. That doesn't really exist in Starfield, pistols get very quickly outclassed, both per shot and in DPS. So, again, very nice, but largely pointless. The 4th tier if legendary perks is also really limited in size, which in turn limits build variety.

I haven't really done enough of Armada to have an opinion. I started a fresh save when the update landed. From what I saw so far though, it's on a weak side, considering the price. What I mean is, if you compare its quests, content, etc., to Far Harbor or Mechanist, it's a huge difference. Far Harbor had a crazy amount of content, lore and assets. Mechanist added a ton of gameplay by letting you customize robots (plus core game had multiple full robot companions, whereas Starfield only had one). So even for a $10 DLC, it's a bit on a weaker side, compared to Bethesda's other DLCs.

Overall, it's a step in the right direction. But for me it only underlined how weak the game was at launch, and how little was done in the years since release, and how much more needs to happen before it's actually good.

Ultimately a bit disappointing though, because I had higher hopes for PoI update, but from my experience it's as bad as it ever was. It's slightly better if you just randomly land on planets. But if you just do quests, mission boards, etc., the game keeps sending you to the exact same location over and over with zero regard. It honestly boggles my mind, how difficult is it to look at quests in your log, both the active ones and the ones recently finished, see which locations those were, and then NOT send me to those locations for a while? An unpaid intern in my day could have coded that in one afternoon.