Personally, I couldn’t get through the main and faction stories because of that. I liked the stories well enough, but getting through them was so tedious because I couldn’t even use all my skills. I don’t know how end game is, I have one max lvl character with a bunch of cp, but I rarely play an mmo for end game content.
If they had like a difficulty slider for the open world content, that would be enough to make me return, but I don’t want to shut down my brain while leveling, that’s not fun at all!
Astroneer has some of that vibe, but it’s a simpler and more casual game. Really fun though, worth playing! Your character also needs oxygen to breathe and that makes exploration interesting