After spending hm, a good 9 hours binging on NMS, I'm happy with my purchase. Is it comparable to ED? Not really. ED has a much better flight model, particularly if you have a HOTAS, as much as people might want to argue it has a better model on an XBox controller, no. The answer is no, it sucks on an Xbox controller and it's always -going to suck- on an Xbox controller, you're deluding yourself if you think you perceive any significant difference between ED on a controller and NMS on a controller. If you think you do, that's because you're likely playing on a system not capable of running NMS at the full 60 frames per second.
I can, and since I can run roll, pitch and yaw on the pad, the differences are minimal (after finding the invert flight control option), the AI in ED definitely puts up more of a fight, and you have more buttons to fiddle with in ED than in NMS (fights basically boil down in NMS to who has the bigger guns and deeper shields in a much more simplistic manner, there's no subsystem targeting for instance) but the broad strokes are the same. It's line up lead reticule, unload hot melty death, move on to next target. Rinse, repeat.
On the topic of ships, here's a scary thought, the ships are proc-gen, and they all have different cockpit interiors, what's more, you can actually get some really interesting canopies pretty early on, I'm tooling around in what I'd class as a heavy fighter/ light multipurpose (probably equivalent to the Cobra Mk 3) and the layout is radically different, though much like ED the core UI elements are consistent from one ship to the next. Multitools come with their own little touches and you can get some pretty wild configurations (you're not stuck with the default dinky pistol), and I've got my hands on a 19 slot behemoth which looks more in keeping with a thermal lance as opposed to something you'd probe a bit of ore with.
So, after those nine hours, where am I in terms of my thoughts concerning ED and NMS?
ED -needs- to step up it's game. Not because of NMS *directly* (because like most here, I agree NMS and ED are different enough that they don't warrant a direct comparison) but because between NMS, SC and other games not even space related, ED will invariably suffer a death by a thousand cuts.
NMS has proven beyond any form of reasonable doubt that not only is it *possible* to do an offline version of a space exploration and trading game, but it's *profitable* and you don't lose the so called "mysteries of the universe" by handing over the client to the customer.
All of the reasons Braben provided for wanting the BGS and the always online side of things basically got blown a hole in, and that's what NMS has done, people will look at ED and go "Wait, why does this need a connection? I can play NMS whenever I want and my crappy internet won't shower me with outages when I'm playing it." If SC then goes and proves beyond a reasonable doubt that there's a -competent- space flight model that offers a reasonable alternative to ED then the things ED has going for it will start evaporating *really* fast.
In short, ED needs to make a choice, go full online and offer real persistence in the universe to players, or allow them to go full offline and stop with this instanced client side P2P nonsense that enables cheating and in the end doesn't benefit the consumer one bit.