My problem with it wasn’t that you were restricted to one ship, it was that the customization of that one ship was laughably bland. Instead of “do I want to be a heavy fighter or maybe a quick smuggling ship”, it was “upgrade lasers to level 2 lasers!”. It sucked. I was on board with one ship in theory, expecting the way you could customize your ship to really open a lot of possibilities. I was very wrong.
Hopefully that got better with updates, but I never bothered to go back and check.