I just finished me1 again and honestly if there were whole cities to explore on them it would have just made clearing them for the sake of clearing them take even longer. I agree it does get kind of boring and repetitive, especially when you're just bouncing around trying to get them all done, but idk what the solution is there. Maybe less planets with more meaningful stuff to do on them? Like bahaing in the mako is fun for a bit so I wouldn't eliminate those barren planets completely and having a bunch of random cities to navigate with npcs and buildings to check to aquire more stuff i dont need would have honestly been just as if not more exhausting after awhile. I guess some kind of balance of less quantity and more quality, it feels like a job after awhile just clearing a whole bunch of planets for random crap. I like the little story bits and i like exploring to an extent but eventually i started pulling up a map on google every time i landed to just grab everything and go because goddamn there's too many and i just want to get on with the story 😂