I've never been a fan of plateauing the leveling at latter levels. I'd rather progress not slow or stop even at the cost of shrinking down the rewards to continue the sense of progression, and putting in elements that can give a high end player a run for their money or better yet some system where the top few powers in the game are constantly engaged in an arms race that the player can nudge into.
The last two is probably an impossible load of work though, and the first one is probably going to need a lot of rebalancing that might be too late for this stage of the game.
I do not agree with you that much on this point. A slow progression rate with small improvements is just sad. It is like never accomplishing a thing. I hate those rpg games where you almost always get +% of something instead of new abilities, talents and stuff like that. when you get to use a cool subsystem, when you get to be in zero flux mode even with some percentage of flux being already up, when you can finally put burst lasers everywhere cause you have lot of op... it is rewarding. To stop the sense of progression you really need to play many ours and cap every skill, I really do not see from where your observation is coming about the progression.
Well then it's a good thing I'm not suggesting that.
Progression need not be slower when each level and each skill is divided into smaller chunks. If anything progression would become much faster, especially during the early game and would continue for far longer instead of dwindling off instead of the quick plateauing that happens now.
It's like this: 10000 exp is given. In situation one the player gains 3 levels and gets 20% in a skill. In situation two, the player gains 9 levels and 20% in a skill. Or, you could lower that 20% down to 15%.
Never accomplishing anything is a valid issue, but this isn't synonymous with a slower progression. Slower =/= slow, the progression right now I feel is quite fast in terms of how quickly the bonuses stack up. That slow tree cutting and mining thing with the MM in Starbound is certainly this issue where it is quite correct to say that a lot doesn't happen and this problem would apply, but there would be something awarded if rewards were divided up into smaller bits. While the rewards would be much smaller, they would happen much more frequently. Right now, in the beginning it's all about getting credits to buy more/better ships, later in the game when leveling peters out, it's mostly about getting more credits and buying stuff, leveling and bettering your character's skills simply slows down in molasses and almost stops and progression simply comes down to gaining credits.
As for talents, abilities and stuff like that, I don't think I said anything about the bonuses at the middle and end of the skill tree.