Colony profit is OK. The problem is: player just has no way to spent this much money.
I mean:
1 colony is enough to sustain your main fleet.
2 more, if you wanna just pay money to other factions to stop their attack missions.
What things also demand money? Lets see:
- investing in new colonies. Yes, it can take lot of cash. I remember how i fell from 10kk to 1kk having 4 colonies and starting 3 new simultaneously. But mostly, you will not need that much. May be you do, if you farmed a lot of alphas and now you wanna to colonise each planet in the sector (lol, looks like a nice challenge...)
- building ships. I saw some ships with 1kk building cost. But it is always one-time buying. I mean: you pretty rarely want to lose ships and replace em with new. It is very expensive. Even repairing D-mods is expensive. So, if you do, may be you need that much money. But most players dont do that. Just because, if you play like that, you cand get enough money to get your first colony.
At thats pretty much it. We just have no lategame options. Thats the problem. Is it that bad? Well, yes and no.
No, because Starsector is a sandbox game. It is ok to get to the point when you can just threw money into ships building just to try some interesting setups, which you cant try during early game, because other way enemies can beat your face.
Yes, because theres no actual gameplay. It is a sandbox, you need to invent problems to yourself, then solve em. We need to remember here, that the game is intended to be a sandbox. So, if we dont like it, we can fix it, but only through mods. Or, may be, later we will get some vanilla build-in game modes. Like "play sandbox", "play strategically" and so on. We have missions mode after all, so why not...
What can be done right now? It is hard to say precisely, but at least we need some changes in reputation system and in colony management.
Problems in rep system: you can kill a baby, then save 20 kittens stuck on the trees and society will forgive you for the murder. Sounds stupid, but right now rep works just like that. System must be more complex. May be counting some "unforgivable deeds", removed rep farming during the system bounty event and so on...
Problems in colony management: there are no real choices. What to build: fuel production or mines? Or, may be, lets build some medical facilities? Lol, you can just build all of them. And if you have no space left, you can just get more colonies.
How can we fix that? May be, make some industry-tiers. Just like battle station tiers. 1st tier allows the colony to sustain its demads in that product. 2nd allows some export. 3rd tier opens some unique abilities, which can describe the planet as "sector's bestand most innovative *place your product here*-producer". And may be: 1sr tier demands 1 industry slot, 2nd - two, 3rd one - 4 slots. Number of slots can be increased to 5. And may be we need some new buildings like medical center in Nex.