I don't disagree OP in certain ways, and at first (when it was first released) I was very disappointed with ED because it felt like just a prettier but cut-down version of FE2, but I think the things that ED does better make up for the things it doesn't do as well as FE2 and FFE, and over the years Fdev are adding to the richness of the world and I see that continuing.
I didn't enjoy the ship combat in FE2 and FFE and it was extremely hard/impossible to fly a ship in any meaningful way without the autopilot and associated things (albeit that was fairly realistic, it was mostly waiting while the autopilot took you places). Despite that I loved the games (well, FE2, I never played FFE at the time it was released) and put an insane amount of ours into it.
I have both games even now and I play them occasionally, along with Oolite.
ED has the "ship flying" part down to a fine art, the feel of things is awesome, the combat is great, the sounds are great.
I think the rest will eventually catch up because they're basically just adding detail into the existing framework.
I do miss the more in-depth "Bulletin Board" which actually helped generate quite a lot of world-building.
I'd love to see the old-style ships added to the game as NPC's, as mentioned in other threads, my headcannon is that those ships still exist using the old class 2B hyperdrive, the ships we see using FSD are just a tiny percentage of the space-faring population (since the FSD has only been around for a few years) That explains why there's so few ships in space, there's actually a lot more, you just don't really see them! So when you see the convoy USS beacons and the wrecks and things in my head that's the "old style" ships that have been attacked while slowboating from the edge of the system, etc.
FE2 didn't have a storyline, it was only introduced with FFE, and it was fairly minimal (I think there was something like 6 missions?). The stuff with the Formidine Rift, Barnacles, Thargoids, Colonia and to a degree the smaller "dramas" that contribute to the CG's and things in many ways is equivalent to the scope of the FFE storyline, it's just not formatted as a "mission".
So, overall, I agree in theory, but I think in practice ED is a better game, and has potential to be significantly better as it develops further.