That said, ehh you guys must really be missing out. because it is clear to me that the devs are pushing everything toward the Colony game. Blueprints and colony upgrades are the 2 most important things you get for exploring. as finding weapons are easy enough and all other loot is just something to pawn off. and mind you, you will be doing this 90% of the time. As the only other thing you can do is buy and sell *** from the core worlds or kill ships for x cash bounties. Everything else forces you to explore outer reaches of the sector.
Actually, finding an Aurora or Odyssey hull floating in space can be more valuable to me than say, an Eagle blueprint, to be honest. Or locating a red warning beacon system for alpha core farming (which sell for a pretty penny to Tri-tach if you're not hoarding them for your colonies). Currently, the only ships which can't be purchased off a military market somewhere but do have a blueprint I think are the Revenant and Phantoms, which are merely nice to have but in no way necessary. Also, I think high end merc bounties from contacts tend to have them as logistics ships, so you can scavenge them after battle.
I will note it is quite possible to put together an end game capable fleet without a single colony. The passive income stream from a colony comes with a significant upfront cost, which could alternatively be sunk into ships and maintenance thereof. Also, just selling everything from exploration rather than putting it towards a colony can act as a short term cash infusion to further your own fleet and allow it to jump up the bounty ladder.
This is why this game is already a 4 x game. Because if it wasn't it would be more like Elite dangerous. Least a top down version of it. where your only options would be to just do missions and eventually join up with one of the major fractions. the fact that you can make colonies any planet make it a 4x game. And i already know their has been people who Literately colonized every single planet in the sector. Sure they needed to use a ungodly amount of Alpha cores to do it. But hey if you want to do that you can do that.
I think that makes it a sandbox game. It doesn't necessarily make it a 4x game. As noted, you can play the entire game without ever setting up a colony.
You can sign up with a commission, which at max level is I think ~95k credits a month passively? So the elite dangerous option is there and provides the equivalent income of a size 4 or 5 colony for no upfront cost. Colonies merely exist to let a player reach a point where they don't need to worry about credits anymore. Alex may have some further plans on what to do with all those credits or potential player faction fleets, but it's not in yet, and Alex is keeping his final plans for the sector under wraps.
The fact that there is an administrator limit I think is one of the hints that this is in fact, not a 4x game, but rather a spaceship combat game with some economic considerations (supply, fuel, credits, etc). The game vision is not to have players distracted running some giant empire, but focused on destroying spaceships in combat.
In addition to the administrator limit, there's the fact that profits have a ceiling based on the demand from NPC planets. At some point, more planets with the same industries just won't make more profit. They'll be each getting a smaller and smaller slice of the same overall demand. So it is quite possible 10 planets worth of industries makes as much revenue as 100 planets worth of industries. If players do colonize every planet, it is in spite of the road blocks Alex has put in, not because of any incentives the game rewards you with. The game is trying to drive you towards more combat, not more spreadsheet empire work.
Sure, you can go over the limit with Alpha cores, but that means going out there and actually blowing up Remnant ships with alpha cores in them and playing the combat half of the game for each one of those new colonies. If the administrator limit is raised or eliminated, then you can run 100 colonies without ever getting into combat by just making a loop of all the inhabited worlds every month and just hiring more administrators.