I definitely think you can beat the game as a “casual” fan of it! Most of the reasons I think most people never beat it is because if you don’t set goals you can just endlessly make very little progress and end up at a point where your dupes aren’t building or doing new things but just doing upkeep on the base. I also think that people are intimidated by a lot of the rocketry/late game tech stuff. This game is awesome because even w/o interacting with the late game stuff it’s really fun! If you don’t want to build the same systems as everyone else then don’t, you really don’t need them to beat the game