Yes you're right, you will be free to go anywhere in any direction, but to do and see exactly the same few things each time.
Each one of us will barely go through 1 % of those 400 billions star systems before quit playing Elite Dangerous and move to something else.
Don't be naïves, even exploring will be redundant up to a point. When you will have seen every different types of spaceports, outposts, hotspots, etc., there will be, you will quickly lose interest to wander any further.
The 99 % left will just be the same, but with a random combination of already seen stuff.
And i'm sure of one thing, from a quality standpoint, procedural generation of content cannot match content hand-made my developers.
So yeah, i would rather have a huge but well crafted play area than a limitless but "always the same but with some slight variations" play area.
And i'm not even speaking about planetary landing where the procedural generation will feel even more obvious i fear.
A game this size simply can't be done with handcrafting alone.
Even if you had 10000 developers in some sweatshop working 18 hours a day it would take years and they would barely have a few 1:1 size planets or systems perhaps.
The only ways to multiply your efficiency is by either copy pasting your work, or using procedural generation.
Both rely on using basic building blocks which builds up your world.
Handcrafted design will require big building blocks to speed up assembly.
It's often visible in more conventional games where you can see the same houses, tables, trees and other props allover the game world, maybe with a few variations but that's it.
The only way to make things feel more unique is to lower the scale so that duplication of props happens less.
Problem is then that your game world will be small, and you will be seeing the same locations over and over again.
Procedural generation also uses building blocks, but due to the fact that the brunt of the work is being handled by algorithms and such ,it can do much much more in a short time. This allows building blocks to be very small, which makes it so that there is a much bigger variation in items and props around the world.
These things can further be influenced by artists to implement their own design to override what the program has assembled, either by direct implementation or by tweaking the assembly algorithms.
What you have then is a possibility of making a nearly limitless game world where there is very little duplication of patterns or props if the building blocks are small.
So in handcrafted vs PG you have these two choices.
You either have a small game world, or a large one with a lot of duplication, either way you will be visiting the same locations over and over.
Or you have a huge world, where due to the enormous amount of locations, some are bound to be similar (there's only so many ways you can create a gas giant for example), but none of them will ever the the same.
