Absolutely agree with all of this. The thing I really can't get my head around is why they even bothered to have starships in the game.

It's like at some point, they had this vision of a space exploration game where you could fly about, explore the galaxy, land on planets and walk around etc and you'd have this super cool, fully customisable ship.

Then as they went along, they decided all of that was unachievable but the instead of completely ditching the idea of spaceflight and, I dunno, replacing it with stargates or portals between worlds - something that would lend itself better to picking a destination from a list and fast travelling - they just scrubbed away all the fun stuff about spaceflight and left in a system where the player can almost completely bypass the ship. They can fast travel to the cockpit from anywhere, open a menu, fast travel to a location, open the menu again, then fast travel to a landing point.

Having a ship is just a disappointing reminder of all the fun stuff you can't do.