There should be a happy medium. I haven't played Elite Dangerous in a year because I'm 50 jumps away from where I need to go, which means like 3 hours of nothing but travel. But the realism is out of this world. This Starfield thing of never needing to fly is too far in the other direction. I think a happy medium would be a system like Elite Dangerous, but if you need to travel more than a couple of systems over, have a long distance jump gate or something like that, and maybe autopilot. Eve online has jump gates and autopilot, but it can still take hours to cross the universe. It's more entertaining to have a quick travel option for those scenarios. Eve has wormhole systems that will let you cross the entire universe in a few jumps, but finding those connections will take longer than just flying directly, unless you're in a huge wormhole corporation that uses 3rd party tools to map all of the wormhole connections to known space.

I must confess that sometimes fast travel removes a lot of value from a game. While it saves you a lot of time like a cheat. Cheats also save you time.

You see this issue when one of your core game loop isn't enjoyable. It happens a lot in games, and you notice it if a game gives you and item or ability to play the game less.

This can be okay if this item comes in just as that loop gets boring (like you unlock special flash grab drives part way through the game). But if they let you fast travel from the beginning the likely case is that they found the whole space travel boring and they ended up providing a way around it.

Which leaves people asking "why'd you bother adding it in there"

Sales figures keep going up so why would they wait?

People are even paying more to play it early, what are you talking about.

How is the game loop broken?

I'd say probably not. Unless the graphics were the only thing holding you back, this update does not appear to have done anything to improve the gameplay loop, menu system, or story content.

Compared to previous Bethesda games, it actually ran rather well at launch even when missing the features added by this update. But I'd say there's quite a lot more that needs to be done to call it a good game, with graphics/performance being the lowest priority on the list.

Id wait till post expansion and creation kit imo.

Reletively speaking starfield is already a lot less buggy then other Bethesda game studio titles. Its just matter of fixing parts of the game some users didnt like.

So does this mean the game is finally ready for me to buy?

Nope. Worth waiting for a few more fixes and proper mod support.