I personally don’t get the feeling that the game is too Arcady. I know it’s not a full simulation either. I mean come on, if it was a full sim it would take us months IRL to travel between planets, never mind traveling to the next system. Also, we would have to do a lot more micro management of our ships. We would probably spend more time with spreadsheets, manuals, modding and tweaking our ships than actually flying them.
This is not MS Flightsim. I like MS Flightsim but after awhile I also find it boring. There are other simulators like Kerbal (I forgot the other one where you can fly in WW2). But these don’t seem to have galaxy spanning exploration, trade and combat.
The other problem is that ED is multiplayer. And peer-to-peer multiplayer to boot. All planet generation and all assets have to look the same to all players that visit that location. I don’t know if planets are generated by the galaxy forge when you are the 1st person to visit the system or if it’s generated by a players system in 1st visit and then uploaded to the galaxy server for other commanders.