I have a suggestion, borne from many, many hours spend ingame, checking the discord channel and the various forum: missions.
Alex created an extremelly elaborate sector, X universe style, with the added value of doing all the job with much less resources at hand, which is a win on my book; pretty much everyone else's, from what I could gleen from discussions, chit chatting ang coxing around in the community.
BUT!
More than combat, that is something genuinly fun, compelling, challenging and with few comparissons on the market, more than 4x details, which I love and are objectively tasty gameplay wise (and you can add with mods), I REALLY felt the lack of a "story mode", or "missions", some personality.
Maybe the goal of Alex and the team is to keep THIS feel in the gameplay (you are no hero, you're just one of an horde of spacefarers scraping the bottom of the greasy cesspitt that the sector has become, surviving as best they can and, after a LOT of time, with a LOT of luck, and after an UNHOLY AMMOUNT of retries, testing, restarts and challenges to the player reach the point in wich you trive, becoming a self sustaining military/economic power), but it feels, to me, a little bit cold (dead is far too much and far from truth).
The Red Planet quest? That was most compelling, giving some personality and some "story" objective, giving some personality to the adventure (beside the "diy adventure).
Beside the impersonal bounties, the explorations (with the plus of the unexpected and the risk, the pure unknown), the commerce (and all the emergency thrust tricks you gotta learn to lose system pickets) I would love some set of mission, expecially in a product that is far from a starting point: right now it could be pratically be sold as a full product, unless the team decides to rework some details, add some mechanics or put hand to some main features. It would be a far warmer game.