I feel like the key thing here is that all the vagueness surrounding the game and the fact that for like nearly 2 years we only had probably around 7 minutes of footage to base our opinions off of lead to people assuming the game would just be the that but more.
Which isn't exactly unreasonable you know?
Also I feel like too many people ended up thinking the game was going to be a more accessible space sim, or a game that felt like X2 or Elite that anyone could pick up and play which might have finally been a dream come true for people who were too intimidated by the former but have always dreamed of space exploration.
The list of features missing though is kind of damning, it's actually incredible how much they showed off and how recent most of that stuff was shown off and it jsut isn't in the game in that form.
But honestly all of those features could have been included in the game and I think I would still take massive amounts of issue with it. After 20 or so hours I just don't have it in me to play it anymore. It only needed to do one thing right for me and that was make your ship an exciting thing to upgrade and fly, and it failed spectacularly for me in that regard.
I also have a strong dislike for the way player progression is handled, as well as installing upgrades, stacking all the available ones and having them consume a cargo slot. It makes getting a new ship less fun and more "ugh now i have to grind for copper and aluminum to reinstall 2 levels of warp drive and shields" so you don't even feel like you traded up for at least another 2 hours.
Same with the multi tool, I found a guy giving me higher cap multitool right after dumping all my resources into my current one's mining upgrades and when i backed out to dismantle all of them to try and recover some of the stuff (because you can't uninstall mods and move them to a new one) but when I talked to him again the guy wouldn't offer it to me anymore. So I considered reloading a previous save but then I was unsure if the guy would even offer it on a reload or if it was a totally random event so I just gave up and got off for the night.
The game is actually just not very thrilling to play, discovering the planets is not exciting because there is nothing to see and nothing different to do on each one. Scanning stuff is boring, resource hunting is painfully slow if you're looking for specific stuff, factions are meaningless and trying to shoot at anything is just a total disaster in space or on foot, and the economy / trading is a complete joke. If you could scan ahead of time what the systems around you were trading or wanting that would be interesting, but because money is so useless once you upgrade your suit to a decent amount of slots and get a goodish ship there never feels like a rush to make more of it.
I went from loving this game in the first 2 hours to really just wishing it had been in the oven for another 6 months before release by the time I hit my 20th hour.