Glad to see I'm not the only one feeling this way. Walking around stations, FPS mechanics and planetary landings are unnecessary distractions for FD, and are box-ticking exercises which is exactly what FD wanted to get away from by going to KS instead of a publisher.
Walking around stations has been tried in other similar games, and we've seen how pointless it is. It is fun for five minutes, but what's after that? Is it just a more cumbersome UI than what we currently have? Or is FD really thinking of building an RPG on top of Elite? It's either going to be a useless hindrance, or a shallow RPG experience.
Planetary landings is the same. I've seen people dreaming of visiting planets with varied cities, amazed at their majestic size. Not going to happen. You will have a handful of city types, which will be duplicated in various configurations around the galaxy. Once you've seen one, you've seen them all. The development effort to make planetary landings a fun and lasting gameplay mechanic are beyond the reach of FD - and I believe every developer on earth.
Same thing with flora and fauna. You will have Icy Planet 1, 2 and 3, Rocky Planet 1 and 2, etc. You can travel all the way up and down the west coast in the USA, but every strip mall will look the same.
I have zero interest in FPS gameplay in a space simulator, and almost zero belief that FD could make a compelling FPS game on top of Elite - us FPS gamers are generally a very different demographics than Elite players. We have been spoiled by extremely slick gameplay experiences so the expectations are sky high for FPS mechanics, and again, we've seen similarly resourced companies with no FPS dev experience fail miserably in their FPS endeavors.
FPS mechanics might work if FD and the Elite playerbase was more FPS-oriented, and if FD had background in FPS game development. But since neither is the case, scrap it.
One of the main reasons why I didn't get the unlimited expansions pass was that the planned expansions don't bring anything of value to the game beyond bloat and shallow mechanics.
For those saying "don't play the expansions, then": expansions take away development resources which could be better utilized in fleshing out the bare-bones game in its current state (missions, exploration, trading/economy, bounty hunting, piracy, lore/roleplaying). In their current (speculated) promised state they are just marketing ploys which will fall flat come release. They might bring a few more players, but any MMORPG or FPS player trying out E: D because "now it has this expansion which turns the game into a perfect hybrid of genres" will be bitterly disappointed.
Don't turn E: D into a chimera, but concentrate on perfecting the already sublime, if unfinished, game. I'm sure your marketing department can come up with expansion which are organic and integral to the existing framework (Thargoids! Epic storylines involving ancient artifacts found around far reaches of the galaxy, or boozing and womanizing royals! More ships!)
