I love this game so much. First of all, it's kind of technologically astounding. You can get in your spaceship and take off from a planet and fly to another one and land, all without any loading screens. The planets themselves are sculptable isosurfaces (only to an extent, though; you can't drill a hole through to the other side) and littered with points of interest, unique animals and plants. It's quasi-social -- yo…
I love it too, but after playing KSP so much, it bothers me how compressed space is… although a huge class gripe about NMS is how empty it feels, I actually feel like it’s not empty enough at times. Space doesn’t feel big, and solar systems feel like planets and moons are stacked on top of each other.
At the galactic level, well, first, I never know where I am or what direction I'm going. In NMS, you don't see some oddly bright splotch of light slowly resolve into huge nebula as you slowly jump toward it, like you might in Elite. NMS doesn't seem to render much of the surrounding galaxy when it generates the skybox. There's definitely no sense of galactic orientation because there isn't anything like the Magellanic Clouds or distant galaxies off in the far distance. Your only views of the galaxy are either of the immediate vicinity or a tiny thumbnail.
But hey, without getting too far into spoilers, the whole "obviously procedurally generated" thing is part of the NMS universe's conceit, right? And out of universe, it's clear that Hello Games explicitly set out to *not* create a sim like KSP or Elite: Dangerous but rather something with a unique story and a different player experience entirely. I respect that. The game's a lot of fun, and the story it tells is deeply engaging, if that's what you want.