I've just lost 5 hours of progress because game decided to randomly crash on me. ... I restarted the game, looked at my sad pathetic fleet and amount of credits, and called it quits.
That's gotta sting, that's just awful. I would ragequit too. Just give the game a second chance later.
I agree with OP on this issue.
If you treat your new players as unpaid alpha testers, at least listen to their feedback. Starsector is still in alpha, so a new player is in a position similar to an unpaid alpha tester, and this should make their experiences matter, and their feedback carry some weight, if given sincerely. New players will always have expectations and make assumptions, based on the tropes of your genre, and if those assumptions get violated too often, the game is at fault, not the new players. Starsector has no autosaving whatsoever. What contemporary games do not have autosave?
To get an idea of what games are starsector-adjacent, we can use
this site, which gives us:
RimWorld, Stellaris, PlanetSide 2, Mount And Blade, Factorio, Crusader Kings, Hearts of Iron, Skyrim
So, which of these games don't have an autosave feature? The original mount and blade I guess (not bannerlord). But the lack of it was hardly a feature. The way bannerlord does it would work well IMO.
Add an autosave timer, then trigger a save around that time, preferably at market exit/battle won/jumping, then put the campaign.autosave.zip in the save folder. Loading a save with an autosave newer than the manual save, gives a prompt with a choice of either option. Autosaving without interruption would be nice, but not necessary. This would seem like a good use of dev-time, IMO.
Please try to remember that this is a 1-2 person dev team however. You could easily get lost in the number of feature requests that are possible yet take a substantial amount of work to implement. You have to prioritize in that situation and the feature being in the modding community at all is reason enough to not spend unnecessary time on it imo- especially when that makes the feature completely optional.
IMHO, assuming players will mod your game from day one would not be a good idea, and afaik not what the devs do now. Especially when it's so unclear which mods would be semi-obligatory.