I certainly haven't spent thousands and I do feel like anyone that's spending $1000's on a video game is pretty far gone anyways to be perfectly honest.
As for the game play, I can only speak for myself, but I mean I'm having fun, so that's enough for me. I also only picked it up during the pandemic, so progress has appeared to be far faster from my perspective than those following along for 10+(?) years.
Well last night I played for a few hours with a friend. We met up at a space station and hopped into my 3 person ship, which I had stored a small car in its cargo hold previously. Then we did some mercenary contracts. We attacked some criminals holed up in bunkers on some moons of the planet Crusader. The bunker was guarded at the surface level by a few large automated repeater turrets, so we landed 10 KM away on the other side of some terrain to break line of sight between the turrets and our ship. Then we got the car out of the cargo hold and drove to the bunker and snuck in and attacked our targets, looted, etc.
We made a good deal of cash from this which we can use to purchase new equipment, new ship modules, or new ships.
I also was pleasantly surprised by the mining gameplay. It's a lot more fun than I expected and almost its own mini game.
In the last patch of this year they'll be adding a salvage/scavenging mechanic that let's you extract and recycle raw materials from recently destroyed ships to repair your own ship with or sell for cash.
These are a few of the ways you can play and broadly speaking I enjoy most of them. Does that answer your question?
As for the game play, I can only speak for myself, but I mean I'm having fun, so that's enough for me. I also only picked it up during the pandemic, so progress has appeared to be far faster from my perspective than those following along for 10+(?) years.