For example I just read a very interesting article last night about how our solar system if far from the norm based on the Kepler information. I've said the stellar forge is dead wrong for the last 3 years now because of just that fact.
I'm not so sure. Stellar forge does have a physics-simulation side and does seem to have produced examples of the kind of systems that Kepler found (eg frequent gas giants crazy close to stars etc), and I haven't done any analysis but it has always seemed to me that the solar system is somewhat unusually spread out compared to the average Stellar Forge systems. Whether things turn out to be rarer or more common than they should be seems inherent in an approximation and non-problematic to me. Don't forget that the System Map is intentionally distorting things much like the London Tube Map does, so that systems look much more like the solar system than they are; even a system that looks just like Sol in the system map is usually wildly different if you look at it properly. (Keplar itself is also distorting because certain kinds of planets and orbits are much more visible to it than others, so you inevitably end up back at extrapolation.) At the end of the day, Stellar Forge will always be only an educated-guess approximation, but where to draw a line beyond which the approximation has become meaningfully wrong... that seems arbitrary to me. (If anything it bothers me more that the game simplifies the number of bodies in systems - it's rare for a system to exceed even a hundred bodies, and even accounting for a diameter cutoff the solar system blows that away)
How about finding 2 gas giants in the process of colliding? Or two stars? Or two planets POST collision? DREAM UP some things that will blow our mind. A little clouds and lightning is expected and hardly impressive. BLOW OUR MINDS.
Definitely!
Back in 1984 the original Elite had a super-nova event, so it wouldn't surprise me if someday at least that appeared in Elite Dangerous, though I image it would have a more scientific grounding, meaning the explosion would take place over weeks rather than seconds, with weeks of run-up as an ongoing Galnet story, the system would have CGs to evacuate residents (would the nova star be the jump-star?) and during the days of the explosion there would be lots of (risky) passenger missions to view it slowly unfolding for as long as your heat dissipation can manage... The follow weeks might involve more CGs as nearby systems also started to evacuate ahead of the shockwave. It might all be too slow and orderly to "blow our minds" but it would be fascinating and different, and once the nova infrastructure is in place, they can start happening more often
Speaking of blowing our minds, in general it works much better in VR. Monitors make all stars seem like the same size. Stars are still far too big for the binocular aspect of VR to help impart scale, but somehow it's still a lot easier in VR to see when a star is not like other stars. Stuff is also more visceral in VR.
(Vaguely related, there was one time with a super-giant where I switched to systems map and nearly jumped out of my chair - the star was so crazy massive that instead of seeing the planets arranged on a grid a few meters away it was like a burning wall inches from my nose!)