This is more a question for non-power users. They are the key to widespread adoption and supplanting Windows. The OS has to be user friendly to the point that people don’t need to worry about the terminal unless absolutely necessary but still flexible enough to not alienate the power users that want to dive deep into it.

Could I get a whole saucy magnitude scale from you?

It’s a common practice for car manufacturers. It lets a company gain more market penetration without diluting the expensive brand with cheap models. Companies can start in either camp and create sub brands in either direction. Hyundai for example had their affordable brands Hyundai and Kia, but also have Genesis as their upscale brand. It can also allow each sub company “friendly” competition as with Kia and Hyundai. They share some features and frameworks but they can each have their own teams focusing on different design languages and packages that let them go after the same market and some different edge cases . Ultimately, yeah illusion of choice but there are still some differences.

It’s obvious corpos learn the wrong lessons all the time.

If the day comes I want to upgrade my 3080 I’ll switch to an AMD solution but until then I’ll take any improvement I can get from Nvidia.

The popularity speaks to the contrary; a lot of people want to exist in a universe they get to see neat things. There are quest lines to help push players forward if they want, they just aren’t required and are easy to ignore. I don’t think resource scarcity is meant to be a major aspect of the game but I can see why someone might want it to be.

Every planet doesn’t have every material you need for crafting everything. But a single solar system likely has most of it. There are key elements on every planet that are meant to make sure a player never gets stranded. I guess one could argue for that to be a game mode though if it isn’t already where you very well could end up on a planet and have no way to survive.

A lot of people like the gameplay loop from day one but the initial lies about how multiplayer worked was a driving force behind the unhappiness. Once that was fixed it was a shallow experience but a lot of people would have been content with it. Instead Hello Games keeps supporting it and putting out new content updates. There are still a lot of features and improvements people would like for the game and those very well may see the light of day with the passion Hello Games has shown for improving it. That’s why so many people think favorably of them. There are a ton of other bigger studios that would never show this level of dedication and community support.

I mean if it actually had good diverse gameplay per character and allowed us to obliterate our surroundings I could see it having a player base for a bit. Trying to balance it would be a nightmare for whatever team was tackling it.

It is possible to commit no mistakes in raising a child and they still be little shits. That is not a weakness; that is life.