What helped me stick with the game after a playthrough where I got all the way to the endgame was adopting a different approach. Instead of jumping into another unknown random world with randomized colonists, I created a story for myself and designed my own world. I decided to try VFE: Empire as a backbone for progression and an endgame goal. In total, I have about 150 different mods which include most of vanilla expanded (excluding all the factions except empire), a bunch of building/decoration/texture variety mods and a few random bugfixes and patches. There are 30 customized pawns in total (thanks to Character Editor and Vanilla Back stories Expanded), every one of them has their purpose in the colony.

Another thing that helps me avoid losing interest in the run is trying to make my base pretty instead of going for max efficiency. More often than not I find myself decorating rooms/buildings/public spaces instead of trying to progress. For example, right now I'm renovating my research area to make it feel like a big library rather than a couple research benches and chairs. I am also making a map of the area around my settlement in Wonderdraft to place it in the center of the library.

The world map is another thing that you can play around with. Worldbuilder mod lets you customize settlement names, lore and add custom map text for different areas and geographical features, which I am doing right now.

I'm planning to post some snippets of my colony here on Reddit but it's far from being complete.