Wait what? 

...what is it I'm missing for this comment to make since? 

I thought that too at first. Best advice is get on the base building quest as everything connects back to that in some way or another. The game heavily pushes the main quests at you now but you really have to dive in and take initivate with the side quests and even more so for job quests even though you should be able to find some alien shmo at any space station willing to give you side quests and jobs quests are available always on the right at the merchants guild. Anyway, best way to fall into the loop is through base building, following the Artemis quest line which is the new main quest scenario is another option. I nearly gave up before I seen twitch players doing things I'd never seen in the game before.... or fuck it. You can just fly around space and wander around amd content will eventually pop up. Beware the humming eggs!

Nah,I'm not going to spoil the humming eggs for ya. :D.

It's conpletely different. Theres a 30 hour story (which im finding really entertaining so far) Dozens of side quests, dozens of jobs, a lengthy base building sub quest (I'm 20 hours in on that one and its really fun). It has a space fleet managment meta game, there is emergent gameplay all over the shop from new easter eggs type deals as you explore and ontop of that the prodecural generation is overhauled making everything look so much better than 2 years ago, planets are much more beutiful, interesting and really surprising at times, sometimes I don't want to leave them. Even the third person cameras make the game feel different and much more enjoyable for some reason. The drop in, drop out multiplayer is great.... basically everything except for the first two hours is different. There is triple if not quadruple the amount of content and it's good quality content too.

It's well worth returning too and I'm so glad I did. 

Nah,never said It's a scam but they are taking the piss now and have falling into a way of profiting without releasing the game. The game will never release in the traditional sense and they will continue this whale hunting business after launch and among those whales who are well fed and can pay the hundreds to thousands in funding tiers there are many more smaller fish getting caught in the scheme and can't afford it. The game should be in a cohesive alpha already and not a series of vertical slices, it'll be another two years at least before they drop a beta if they ever even get there. It may not be a scam or started with that intent but it's very nearly bordering on it. This will always be early access and the money they've gotten has being horribly mismanaged. Many games have taken this same approach with a LOT less funding and have released finished products amazingly polished (e.g Project CARS) in a third the time since crowd funding was announced and in that example have pushed out a sequel. Insanely high aspirations or not its unacceptable but as I said,its on the funders for not pulling out even now and continuing to double down on fugasi. Squadron 46 will probably release as a finished product but anyone thinking the promise of a finished game can be met without charging full price even to funders and a great deal more funding between now and then. The point was anyway that NMS isn't in the same category as early access or crowd funded games for obvious reasons as they released a finished game,do those ethical worries should factor into any arguments. Perhaps, over hype and the issue with pushing to keep ontop of the hype should be the topic of discussion.

Yeah. Apparently 20-30 hours depending on what mode you choose I'm about 5 hours into it on creative. It's surprisingly deep and lore full, really interesting too. There's also a story to the base building quests which is seperate, it's more subtle but full of lore and there's a ton of smaller stories littered into side quests that seem to tie back to the new scenario. I'm not far enough into it to comment on that quite yet but I can see it so far. I think the story was added in the last Atlas rises update. Like I said in the OP, the game is really deep now, it's easy to tell when re-reviews( like IGNs horrible attempt) didn't even dive into that content added in the last two years and probably played for 5 hours or so for footage just experiencing the surface changes. 

I think if a developer puts in that much work on FREE updates that are actually good, they deserve to be rewarded for it.