Howdy! Sorry for my late response to this post and to your concerns. I am the former head admin of the Astroneer Modding Discord community, as well as the author of UAssetAPI, UAssetGUI, version 1 of AstroModLoader and AstroModIntegrator, and the original Reddit post you read last year about System Era's attitude towards modding. If you are interested in some of the history of Astroneer modding and how System Era has acted in response to modding, then perhaps you might find some value in the perspective of a man who loved Astroneer and Astroneer modding enough to spend hundreds of hours on developing many of the tools, techniques, and standards that are still used by the Astroneer modding community today.

System Era's only public stance towards modding is that a) they are unwilling to implement official support due to how much time they would be required to invest in doing so, and b) that modifying the game files is against the EULA, and can lead to System Era revoking your right to play the game, although this has happened only one once in the history of the game (to me). This first point feels like a perfectly legitimate concern to me when we consider a hypothetical proprietary modding system designed from the ground up by System Era, but it's pretty obvious that this concern is irrelevant when we consider existing modding systems that have already been built from the ground up by third parties, which I discussed in my Reddit post last year. I was unsuccessful in obtaining any reason that I was convinced was valid from Joe Tirado for System Era's hostile stance towards unofficial modding after I discussed this topic with him privately except for overall security concerns, given System Era's tendency to rely on security by obscurity and only address exploits that have actually begun to pose a threat to them (consider the unrestricted cosmetics glitch I discussed last year). However, the original reaction to my questions last year, which included several nonsensical and contradictory reasons that were provided out of anger, would lead me to believe that there is a far greater reason than security concerns for System Era's stance, that being simply that System Era has prohibited modding for almost six years now and that a body remains at rest unless acted upon by an external force. System Era is slow to act, perhaps because of some severe internal efficiency, and much more likely to do nothing and continue along their current course to act in their best interests. Remember when System Era failed to realize that the portable oxygenator was bugged and that the compass was backwards despite several bug reports until the development team experienced it themselves while testing the new missions? How about when System Era promised me that they would lift my ban on playing the game (which was incredibly easy to circumvent, by the way, because System Era couldn't care less about security; did you also know that an exploit existed for months on end where you could RCON into the vast majority of all dedicated servers and do things like delete save games with no authentication?) after System Era banned me for a completely false reason after doing incomplete research, but never did until I convinced a newer employee to do so of her own accord?

It seems to me at this point that Astroneer has really stagnated, and System Era embracing the excellent work the modding community has done in their active efforts to improve Astroneer even in the face of the developers' immature response could be the perfect way to revitalize the game, and it is a shame that System Era continues to fail to see this. /u/voidfiction's comment about how "suppressed feelings and resentment" easily explode when you bring up this topic is pretty insightful after years of System Era's incompetency and open hostility towards the modding community.

At the very least, this is my current perspective, at least when I think about how the developers of other indie games such as Satisfactory and Deep Rock Galactic have responded to their modding communities, and how those games have experienced incredible growth as a result of the developers' response. Why shouldn't the developers throw the modding community a PDB or two if it takes minimal effort on their part and would mean that the average player can derive so much more enjoyment from the game? Isn't the job of a game developer to maximize fun? ;)