So having played through the unmodded game to what I'd reasonably call the end, I want to argue that the current "progression" is way too fast. To keep things clear I'll try to be specific.
By progression I mean several things.
First off, the acquirement of ships through salvage. Admittedly, I choose the talents for this when playing because they're very strong early on. Some opportunistic salvaging will get you a maxed fleet pretty quickly, usually with a nice smattering of quality hulls albeit d-modded. Talents account for d-mods to the point they're almost beneficial early on because of the reduced upkeep, so that's not altogether a problem. The key point I'm trying to make is that the game isn't throwing a lot of obstacles your way if all you're trying to do is get a huge fleet of random stuff.
Once you've amassed a fleet you can usually bully your way around the core worlds, eating all the pirates you can catch. This will get you enough stuff to explore planets and drop a colony, which is the second big problem with progression speed. Just dropping down a colony is guaranteed to pay off, because:
- Colonies are net positive from the get go.
- New colonies don't get credibly threatened.
What do I mean by them not being credibly threatened? Well, if you drop a colony down about when you're able to, the pirates aren't doing that much. The strong factions don't care too much before you start stealing market share, which gives time to earn a bunch of credits and buff up the station. For the colony transition to make sense, I think your colonies should start out very vulnerable and continuously draining credits until they have time to ramp up production and trade routes. By very vulnerable I mean that the player should have to hang around nearby and be ready to swoop in with their fleet to stop people trying to destroy/steal your colony. The intent of all that is that the player should have amassed a decent nest egg to deal with all these early issues before they start dropping colonies down. Once they actually manage to protect a colony it's fine if it starts being a (reasonable) net positive resource generator, because you'll feel like you earned it.
Another issue I had was that mod specs drop like crazy; I had almost all of them before I dropped my first colony, which I could do very early. I thought I was in for finding a bunch more mod specs down the line since they're often (always?) tagged as "Common" and was excited to do so through exploring, but no such dice. I felt disappointed about that and felt that the game just threw all the mod specs at me before I even really knew how modding/refitting ships worked.
Similarly high end stuff like nanoforges, synchrotrons and ship blueprints dropped in droves for me at the various places you find them, and once my colonies had shipyards I felt that I had the run of the whole game. The ease with which I could reach that power level made me feel like the other factions in the game were jokes, since they supposedly have greater resources than the player and have a "head start" since they've been around for a long time.
Overall I think the game is a lot of fun and has a ton of content, but the way it gives it all away to the player so early on makes it feel like the (unmodded) game is shorter than it has to be.