I held off on playing NMS until last year, I have a lot of experience with similar games on PC like Empyrion and had my expectations set by that game. Boy you couldn't be more right about the planets, just about actual planet size, but nothing interesting but cloned points of interest. Empryion's world generation is fantastic, very believable and smooth, transitioning between biomes and having those features being visible from space.

I got around 10ish or 15ish hours out of NMS, and I just noped out when I realized the best way to get a ship was to buy it from a random NPC who just landed, found a ship I liked, bought it, didn't like the color and found I couldn't repaint it (at that time, maybe that changed). Between all the stuff we've mentioned, plus weird bugs like ships warping into atmosphere but then glitching through the ground. Meh.

Light No Fire looks interesting, but my gut feeling is, it'll be a huuuuge world, largely full of nothing worth while. I'll keep an eye on it to see how it develops, and how it's received at launch. My default position is .... cautiously optimistic.