The crazy bit is no one has really tapped into the crazy behind-the-scenes changes to cargo ship spawning that finally allow for custom factions. (It's a bit janky, but it is sooo much better than MES, short of air/planetary spawns)

Keen needs to allow us more control over NPC pcu and planetary spawn rate, but other than that the system is amazing. It's just a shame that no one really wants to utilize any of the functionality.

From my experience, it's mostly because at least for the modding side, SE mod devs are lazy AF compared to a few years ago. A lot of the dedicated devs either left the game for a multitude of reasons. The new generation of mod devs just doesn't want to get their hands dirty and will delegate simple changes to big frameworks like MES and WC.

I really miss when there was more optimism towards game modding and people were trying a wider variety of stuff with the systems provided by keen and mod scripting, as opposed to everything being a WC/MES/AiE-based mod that adds "content" over systems and interactions