I'm so impressed that this game is so massive considering the hardware specs of the day. I'm inspired to attempt to create my own game and would really love a similar feel.
If you really are interested in this for the "research" aspect, i think you should also take a look at the game "noctis", it has no combat, no civilization, no nothing.... it just is a bunch of precedurally generated systems and planets, and exploration. For the non "elite-core systems (thos kinda halfway handcrafted) however , i think noctis..... thanks to it being "later", actually does a more advanced job a procedural planet generation.
Of course, if DB today did e4, that would in turn make noctis look "old". But with e4 and no tech-lessons out yet, i'd say if you mainly are interested in purely procedural planet/sys terrain generation, noctis will show you more than E1/E2/E3.
The problem - as i mentioned elsewhere - is that planet/sys terrain generation is at most just 25% of the job. The rest is making a populated system actually feel like a sys inhabited by LIFEFORMS, instead of the player just pressing buttons, and feeling as if he only ever interacted with "computers". What this entails, is among other things freeform textual content. Like, being able to talk with people, via multiple choice menus. Or generation of a system's textual descriptions. Or newspapers. Or job offerings, etc.
