But even putting aside the fact that NMS fell so short of the hype, perhaps you forget that there were critical, game breaking bugs at release. Like common issues where the core what chain would break, and then you wouldn’t get fundamental recipes like warp fuel, and then couldn’t leave the first system.
I mean, i played it at release as well, and i probably enjoyed it more than most as i tend to be able to work around such bugs… But NMS was absolutely broken in very fundamental ways at release.